Colin Morningstar

Professor, Physics

Education

Ph.D., University of Toronto

Research

My research interests primarily concern nonperturbative phenomena in quantum field theories, with particular emphasis on the study of hadron formation and confinement in quantum chromodynamics using computer simulations of quarks and gluons. Two past highlights include a first comprehensive determination of the glueball spectrum in pure Yang-Mills and the spectrum of heavy-quark hybrid mesons in the leading Born-Oppenheimer approximation (neglecting light quark loops).  I am currently a member of the Hadron Spectrum Collaboration which is focussing on ab initio determinations of the excited baryon and meson spectra using lattice QCD Monte Carlo methods.  Our computations are carried out on the NSF Teragrid and on machines available through the DOE's INCITE program.  Curtis Meyer and I run our own local computing cluster.

Selected Publications

• C. Morningstar et al.,Improved stochastic estimation of quark propagation with Laplacian Heaviside smearing in lattice QCD, Phys.Rev. D83, 114505 (2011).
• J. Bulava et al., Nucleon, Δ and Ω excited states in N_f = 2+1 lattice QCD, Phys. Rev. D82, 014507 (2010).
• M. Peardon et al., A Novel quark-field creation operator construction for hadronic physics in lattice QCD, Phys. Rev. D80, 054506 (2009).
• J. Bulava et al., Excited state nucleon spectrum with two flavors of dynamical fermions, Phys. Rev. D79, 034505 (2009).
• H.W. Lin et al., First results from 2+1 dynamical quark flavors on an anisotropic lattice: light-hadron spectroscopy and setting the strange-quark mass, Phys. Rev. D79, 034502 (2009).
• S. Basak et al., Lattice QCD determination of patterns of excited baryon states, Phys. Rev. D76, 074504 (2007).
• C. Morningstar, The Monte Carlo method in quantum field theory, hep-lat/0702020 (2006).
• Y. Chen et al., Glueball matrix elements on anistropic lattices, Phys. Rev. D73, 014516 (2006).
• S. Basak et al., Clebsch-Gordan construction of lattice interpolating fields for excited baryons, Phys. Rev. D72, 074501 (2005).
• S. Basak et al., Group-theoretical construction of extended baryon operators in lattice QCD, Phys. Rev. D72, 094506 (2005).
• C. Morningstar and M. Peardon, Analytic smearing of SU(3) link variables in lattice QCD, Phys. Rev. D69, 054501 (2004).
• K. Jimmy Juge, J. Kuti, and C. Morningstar, Fine structure of the QCD string spectrum, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 161601 (2003).
• S. Collins et al., Scaling and further tests of heavy meson decay constant determinations from NRQCD, Phys. Rev. D63, 034505 (2001).
• C. Morningstar and M. Peardon, The glueball spectrum from an anisotropic lattice study, Phys. Rev. D60, 034509 (1999).