The following is a (slightly updated) press release issued at the LATTICE 2001 conference in Berlin. It gives a broad flavour of what Alistair Hart works on. In more excruciating detail, you could try the publication list. Eventually I'll put something up to bridge the gap a little better. (I've been saying that for a while...)
In the past, and since 1960, physicists have developed a `standard model' to describe fundamental elementary particle interactions, laying the foundations for many other fields like chemistry and nuclear physics. Although this model works extremely successfully in the energy range that can be explored with today's particle accelerators, physicists have a strong suspicion that the standard model is incomplete and that there exist phenomena at very high energies that cannot be described or explained by it.
The planned next generation of accelerators will enter the energy range where such new physics may show up, physics that we don't know or dream of today. It thus is important that the approximate methods usually used to perform computations in the standard model are enhanced by exact results obtained from first principles - the objective of lattice gauge theory. To do this, we must depart from our picture of nature as being continuous, using a discrete lattice of space-time points instead. The method then allows us to perform numerical simulations on modern computers. In fact, the equations to be solved in these simulations are so complicated that only the most powerful supercomputers in the world can tackle the problem.
In order to have enough computer power, physicists in Europe and the USA have even embarked on the bold enterprise of building computers on their own, developing chips, boards and fast interconnecting networks. Massively parallel machines are working worldwide around the clock for international collaborations in Europe, Japan and the USA to produce results that will finally allow us to disentangle whether deviations between theoretical predictions and experimental data are really due to the anxiously anticipated new physics.
This prospect ignites the excitement and enthusiasm of `lattice physicists' and leads to meetings like the annual LATTICE conferences, where the latest results are presented, discussed and exchanged.
The symposium is the main conference of lattice field theory and receives worldwide recognition in elementary particle physics and computational science. It has a remarkable tradition. It started in 1982 and has developed into an annual series visiting many international venues: