Hadronic Light-Front Wavefunctions and QCD Phenomenology

Abstract

A fundamental goal in QCD is to understand 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. A natural calculus for describing the bound-state structure of relativistic composite systems in quantum field theory is the light-front Fock expansion which encodes the properties of a hadrons in terms of a set of frame-independent n-particle wavefunctions. Light-front quantization in the doubly-transverse light-cone gauge has a number of remarkable advantages, including explicit unitarity, a physical Fock expansion, the absence of ghost degrees of freedom, and the decoupling properties needed to prove factorization theorems in high momentum transfer inclusive and exclusive reactions. A number of applications are discussed in these lectures, including semileptonic B decays, two-photon exclusive reactions, and deeply virtual Compton scattering. The relation of the intrinsic sea to the light-front wavefunctions is discussed. A new type of jet production reaction, "self-resolving diffractive interactions" can provide direct information on the light-front 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.