Lattice Gauge Theory ’86

Book excerpt: This volume contains the Proceedings of'the International Workshop "Lattice Gauge Theory 1986", held at Brookhaven National Laboratory, September 15 - 19, 1986. The meeting was the sequel to the one held at Wuppertal in 1985, the Proceedings of which have appeared in the same Plenum series. During the past few years, a considerable number of meetings on lat tice gauge theory have been held, on both sides of the Atlantic. With our workshop, through early planning and coordination with other prospective organizers, we tried to channel this activity into one major yearly meeting. For 1986, these efforts were successful, and it is our hope that a pattern has been set for the coming years. One result, however, was that the number of participants considerably exceeded that normally found at NATO Advanced Research Workshops. This year, a "nucleus" of NATO-supported experts induced a large number of further interested specialists to obtain their own funds - thus greatly amplifying the impact of the event. The topics covered at the workshop ranged from hadron spectra to strong interaction thermo dynamics; they included spontaneous symmetry breaking and Higgs models, renormalization group methods, as well as many contributions on various possible schemes for the simulation of dynamical quarks. First systematic applications of finite size scaling to lattice gauge theory were discussed, and the approach to the continuum limit was considered in detail.