Product Information
Description
An annual survey of the hep-lat arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 100 papers and organised into 28 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.
Book framework (share of the year's output):
- Finite Temperature QCD and Spectral Functions (89.5%) — This cluster focuses on understanding QCD thermodynamics and spectral properties at finite temperature and density, including chiral symmetry restoration, confinement-deconfinement transitions, and transport coefficients.
- Hadronic Structure and Parton Distribution Functions (5.1%) — This cluster aims to compute parton distribution functions, form factors, and hadronic matrix elements from first principles, with emphasis on improving precision for phenomenology like the muon g-2.
- QCD Phase Diagram and Dense Matter (2.5%) — This cluster investigates the QCD phase diagram at finite baryon density and temperature, including critical points, phase transitions, and properties of dense nuclear matter.
- Lattice Gauge Theory and Quantum Simulation (1.3%) — This cluster explores novel computational and quantum simulation approaches to lattice gauge theories, including quantum algorithms, tensor networks, and machine learning techniques.
- Sign Problem and Complex Action Methods (0.9%) — This cluster addresses the sign problem in lattice field theory through complex Langevin dynamics, path optimization, and other numerical techniques for systems with complex actions.
- Charm and Heavy Flavor Physics (0.7%) — This cluster focuses on charmed hadron spectroscopy, interactions, and decays, including exotic states and the role of dynamical charm quarks in lattice simulations.
Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.
