Probing the Mysteries of Quantum Fields with AI and Supercomputers: Lattice QCD and Machine Learning

Protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons bound by the strong force. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of this force, can hardly be solved with pen and paper, so physicists compute it on supercomputers by discretizing spacetime on a lattice (lattice QCD). In the first half, I introduce what quantum fields are and why such large computations are needed. In the second half, I present our work on speeding up lattice QCD with neural networks that respect the symmetries of physics.