A decade after the discovery of the Higgs boson and with the
non-observation of particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large
Hadron Collider, several research avenues in particle physics are
being pursued in parallel. These include the search for dark matter
particles, the quest to complete the determination of neutrino
oscillation parameters and their absolute mass scale, as well as the
intensified search for deviations between Standard Model predictions
and experimental measurements of precision observables. While the
Standard Model of particle physics has been enormously successful at
predicting observables measured in collider experiments, it fails to
account for gravity, for neutrino oscillations and for dark matter,
which makes up for 27 percent of the energy in the universe.
Project SIMDAMA, based on the `lattice QCD' framework, aimed at
enabling a more stringent test of the Standard Model (SM),
contributing to narrowing down the list of dark-matter candidate
particles, and reducing uncertainties in neutrino detection. In all
cases, the complexity of the strong interaction is a bottleneck in
pursuing these research avenues. The strong-interaction physics is
addressed within SIMDAMA using the ab initio method of lattice
QCD. The method is numerically very demanding and requires massively
parallel computing resources.
As a conclusion of SIMDAMA, the scattering of light by light via
hadrons contribution in the muon g-2 cannot explain the existing
tension between its direct experimental measurement and the
theoretical prediction based on the SM. Neutrinos are more likely to
be scattered by protons at momentum transfers of typical hadronic
scale than previously thought; and the scattering of hypothetical
massive dark matter particles on nuclei via exchange of a Higgs
particle can now better be quantified. And the quark-gluon plasma
emits hard photons at a rate in line with weak-coupling predictions.
