Michael John Creutz (born November 24, 1944) is an American theoretical physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory specializing in lattice gauge theory and computational physics.
Creutz was born in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. [1] His father, Edward Creutz, was also a physicist and was working on the Manhattan Project to help build the atomic bomb at the time of Michael's birth. [2] [3]
Creutz graduated with honor with a bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1966. He did his graduate work at Stanford University under a NSF Graduate Fellowship, graduating in 1970. His thesis was done at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and his adviser was the noted physicist Sidney Drell.
After his graduation he served shortly as a research associate at SLAC before moving to the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was a fellow from 1970-1972. In 1972 he joined the High Energy Theory Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, becoming a senior physicist in 1985 and serving as group leader from 1984 to 1987. In 2003 he became an adjunct professor at the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at nearby Stony Brook University. [1]
Creutz's research spans a wide variety of topics in particle physics and mathematical physics, but he is best known for his work on lattice QCD. [4] His 1983 textbook Quarks, Gluons, and Lattices was the first full-length textbook on lattice QCD and is considered a classic in the field.
Creutz is a fellow of the American Physical Society and was the 2000 recipient of the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics "for first demonstrating that properties of QCD could be computed numerically on the lattice through Monte Carlo methods, and for numerous contributions to the field thereafter." [5] In 2009 he received a Humboldt Research Award.
In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type of quantum field theory called a non-abelian gauge theory, with symmetry group SU(3). The QCD analog of electric charge is a property called color. Gluons are the force carriers of the theory, just as photons are for the electromagnetic force in quantum electrodynamics. The theory is an important part of the Standard Model of particle physics. A large body of experimental evidence for QCD has been gathered over the years.
In physics, lattice gauge theory is the study of gauge theories on a spacetime that has been discretized into a lattice.
In particle physics, a glueball is a hypothetical composite particle. It consists solely of gluon particles, without valence quarks. Such a state is possible because gluons carry color charge and experience the strong interaction between themselves. Glueballs are extremely difficult to identify in particle accelerators, because they mix with ordinary meson states. In pure gauge theory, glueballs are the only states of the spectrum and some of them are stable.
Lattice QCD is a well-established non-perturbative approach to solving the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory of quarks and gluons. It is a lattice gauge theory formulated on a grid or lattice of points in space and time. When the size of the lattice is taken infinitely large and its sites infinitesimally close to each other, the continuum QCD is recovered.
Quark matter or QCD matter refers to any of a number of hypothetical phases of matter whose degrees of freedom include quarks and gluons, of which the prominent example is quark-gluon plasma. Several series of conferences in 2019, 2020, and 2021 were devoted to this topic.
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