Theoretical elementary particle physics is dealing with the laws of the fundamental forces, like the electromagnetic, the weak and the strong interaction forces and with the structure of the elementary particles. The framework of elementary particle theory is quantum field theory, in particular, the Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories. Our research plays a crucial role for the interpretation of the particle accelerator experiments performed at DESY and elsewhere. Current activities of the Theory Group at DESY Zeuthen concern: phenomenology of high energy processes, electroweak theory, non-perturbative and perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).

One particular focus of our interest is the lattice formulation of QCD where the theory is constructed on a discrete Euclidean lattice.
Besides being a theoretically sound definition of QCD, lattice QCD allows also a numerical evaluation of the path integral which is taken to quantize the system.

The ZPPT group is the merger of the previous Zeuthen theory group and the NIC group. For historical information follow the links to the old web pages.