	SSP 1994 project summary:

[EPCC home] [SSP home] [2001 projects] [2000 projects] [1999 projects] [1998 projects] [1997 projects] [1996 projects] [1995 projects] [1994 projects] [1993 projects]

Quantum Chromodynamics Visualisation

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction, the force responsible for binding the primordial quarks and gluons to form the protons and neutrons that make up the majority of matter. In general the theory is not amenable to analytical solution. Lattice QCD uses large-scale simulation in four-dimensional spacetime to perform a numerical investigation of the properties of QCD. The simulations involve the Monte Carlo generation of large datasets; physical properties of the world are then determined from statistical averages over these datasets.

The four-dimensional nature of these datasets makes visualisation problematic, and typically physicists produce one-dimensional graphs that represent the evolution of a scalar quantity with time. However there are quantities where the visulisation in three spatial dimensions would be very useful: the distribution of quarks within a pion or proton, or the density of the gluons that "glue" the quarks together.

The project will be in a number of phases. The initial phase will involve constructing an environment to visualise three dimensional fields of numbers, possibly using the fourth dimension of the data to produce animations.

Once this structure is in place code has to be written to extract relevant properties from existing data-sets. The work involved in this stage is very flexible as there are a variety of quantities that may be worth visualising. Some simple properties can be extracted by simple manipulations of a single data-set. Other more complex properties are constructed from several data-sets. This work is being carried out in close collaboration with members of the local QCD research group.

Helen Ashton worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of Helen's final report is available here (517703 bytes) . Compressed PostScript of the manual Helen produced for visualising QCD data is available here . Finally, an HTML version of the manual, easily browsable on-line, is available here .

Webpage maintained by mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk