Hadronic Light-Cone Wavefunctions and the Unification of QCD Bound-State Phenomena

Abstract

The light-cone Fock representation encodes the bound-state quark and gluon properties of hadrons, including their helicity and flavor correlations, in terms of universal process-independent and frame-independent wavefunctions. It also provides a physical factorization scheme for separating hard and soft contributions in both exclusive and inclusive hard processes. A new type of jet production reaction, ''self-resolving diffractive interactions'' can provide direct information on the light-cone wavefunctions of hadrons in terms of their QCD degrees of freedom as well as the composition of nuclei in terms of their nucleon and mesonic degrees of freedom.