D'ELIA Massimo

Research interests

My research is mainly devoted to the study of QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics), the theory of strong interactions, in the non-perturbative regime. The open questions that I try to answer are the following. Why are the elementary degrees of freedom of QCD, quarks and gluons, not visible in Nature and instead confined into hadrons? Is confinement a permanent state of matter, or extreme conditions may exist, described by different phases of the theory and reproduced in the early stages of the Universe, in compact astrophysical objects, or in heavy ion experiments? My research tools are mostly represented by numerical simulations of QCD discretized on a space-time lattice. The computational problem is highly non-trivial and requires to make use of architectures at the frontier of parallel supercomputing.