Breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers help explain why there is almost no anti-matter in the universe

Powerful supercomputers have shed light on the behaviour of key sub-atomic particles, in a development that could help explain why there is almost no anti-matter in the universe. An international collaboration of scientists, including physicists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, has reported a landmark calculation of the decay of an elementary particle called a kaon, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The calculation took 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Class Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory in the US. The computations are performed using the techniques of lattice quantum chromodyamics (QCD -- the theory that describes fundamental quark-gluon interactions), in which the decay is inputted into a computer as a finite grid of space-time points.