William and Mary Researcher's Work Honored with Prestigious "Editor's Choice" Designation
by Prof. P. Vahle
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January 16, 2015
A paper authored by recent William and Mary Ph.D. recipient, Zachary Brown, was singled out out in the prestigious journal, Physical Review D. According to the editors, the article is one of "a small number of papers published in Physical Review D that the editors and referees find of particular interest, importance, or clarity." The article, a part of the thesis work of Dr. Brown, describes the result of Lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics calculations to compute the ground state masses of spin 1/2 and 3/2 baryons that contain charm and bottom quarks. The masses of 36 such particles are computed. Fourteen of these particles had already been observed in experiments such as those taking place at CERN's LHC collider, but the remaining 22 were not observed at the time this work was completed and so are theoretical predictions of the fundamental theory of strong interactions. The calculations required state of the art supercomputers operated at national laboratories, but initial stages of these calculations were performed on the 1 TFlop William and Mary computer cluster. This calculation is the most comprehensive determination of the mass spectrum of flavored baryons to date. A recent publication from the LHCb collaboration claims to have already observed two of the predicted states with the correct masses (see http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4849). The paper was co-authored by William and Mary Prof. K. Orginos and former William and Mary Prof. W. Detmold. The article can be viewed at: http://journals.aps.org/prd/issues/90/9.
