The Light-Cone Fock State Expansion and Hadron Physics Phenomenology

Abstract

The ensemble of light-cone Fock wavefunctions $\{\psi_{n/H}(x_i,\vec k_{\perp i},\lambda_i)\}$ provides a conceptual basis for representing physical hadrons and nuclei in terms of their fundamental quark and gluon degrees of freedom. A number of applications of the light-cone formalism to QCD phenomenology are briefly reviewed, such as the origin of Regge behavior of polarized structure functions, the high momentum transfer behavior of exclusive reactions, the color transparency properties of diffractive vector meson photoproduction, and the behavior of quark distributions at large $x_{bj}$. The light-cone formalism illuminates novel features of hadron physics, such as the intrinsic gluon and heavy quark distributions, the quark - antiquark asymmetry of the intrinsic heavy quark sea, and the importance of rearrangement mechanisms in heavy quarkonium decay. I also discuss the potential for measuring the shape of the valence light-cone Fock wavefunction of hadrons and photons in nuclear diffractive multi-jet production.