The Light-Cone Fock Expansion in Quantum Chromodynamics

Abstract

A fundamental question in QCD is the non-perturbative structure of hadrons at the amplitude level--not just the single-particle flavor, momentum, and helicity distributions of the quark constituents, but also the multi-quark, gluonic, and hidden-color correlations intrinsic to hadronic and nuclear wavefunctions. The light-cone Fock-state representation of QCD encodes the properties of a hadrons in terms of frame-independent wavefunctions. A number of applications are discussed, including semileptonic B decays, deeply virtual Compton scattering, and dynamical higher twist effects in inclusive reactions. 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 quark and gluon degrees of freedom as well as the composition of nuclei in terms of their nucleon and mesonic degrees of freedom. The relation of the intrinsic sea to the light-cone wavefunctions is discussed. The physics of light-cone wavefunctions is illustrated for the quantum fluctuations of an electron.