Only one old scientist is responsible for the maintenance of the essential software ``FORM'' for elementary particle physics, the danger of stagnating research as it becomes unusable with new equipment



Developed in the 1980s and has been used in state-of-the-art particle physics for over 30 years since then, the software '

FORM ' is becoming obsolete, and if it becomes unusable, it will be a painful blow for researchers in this field. Quanta Magazine, a scientific news site, reported that there is a danger of becoming.

Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence | Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/crucial-computer-program-for-particle-physics-at-risk-of-obsolescence-20221201/

According to Quanta Magazine, elementary particle physics is a research field that deals with particularly long equations among sciences. For example, in the search for new elementary particles at the Large Hadron Collider , thousands of Feynman diagrams are created to predict the consequences of particles colliding at near-light speed. contains complex formulas with millions of terms.

Calculation of such formulas requires software called a formula processing system , but the most prominent one is 'FORM' developed by Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren.



Since its release in 1989, FORM has continued to be useful as a foundation for research in particle physics, and even since the 2000s, papers written using FORM have been published at a rate of one every few days. increase. Regarding how FORM contributes to modern particle physics, Professor Thomas Gehrmann of the University of Zurich said, ``Most of the high-precision computational results our group has obtained in the last 20 years depend heavily on the FORM code. I was doing it,' he said.

Mr. Vermaseren, who has been responsible for the maintenance of FORM so far, is approaching the age of 73 at the time of writing the article, and no successor has appeared. Quanta Magazine points out that one of the reasons for this is the incentive structure of academia, which emphasizes the publication of papers and tends to neglect the contribution to research tools.

There are some young physicists working on the development of FORM, but I have no choice but to give priority to my own research in order to build achievements and careers. In the meantime, FORM is getting more and more obsolete, and it's becoming an inconvenient software that only works on old devices.

Some researchers choose a more user-friendly formula manipulation system such as 'Mathematica', but Mathematica is an order of magnitude slower than FORM, so particle physicists will eventually be unable to tackle problems that cannot be calculated without using FORM. possibility is feared.



Vermaseren plans to hold a summit of FORM users in April 2023 to discuss plans for the continuation of FORM and how to demonstrate the power of FORM to a new generation of researchers. . But if the effort doesn't bear fruit, Quanta Magazine warns that there will be no researchers left to do the difficult calculations, and that research in particle physics will be severely stagnated.

in Software,   Science, Posted by log1l_ks