Some new/old approaches to QCD
In this lecture I shall discuss some recent attempts to revive some old ideas to address the problem of solving QCD. I believe that it is timely to return to this problem which has been woefully neglected for the last decade. QCD is a permanent part of the theoretical landscape and eventually we will have to develop analytic tools for dealing with the theory in the infra-red. Lattice techniques are useful but they have not yet lived up to their promise. Even if one manages to derive the hadronic spectrum numerically, to an accuracy of 10% or even 1%, we will not be truly satisfied unless we have some analytic understanding of the results. Also, lattice Monte-Carlo methods can only be used to answer a small set of questions. Many issues of great conceptual and practical interest-in particular the calculation of scattering amplitudes, are thus far beyond lattice control. Any progress in controlling QCD in an explicit analytic, fashion would be of great conceptual value. It would also be of great practical aid to experimentalists, who must use rather ad-hoc and primitive models of QCD scattering amplitudes to estimate the backgrounds to interesting new physics. I will discuss an attempt to derive a string representation of QCD and a revival of the large N approach to QCD. Both of these ideas have a long history, many theorist-years have been devoted to their pursuit-so far with little success. I believe that it is time to try again. In part this is because of the progress in the last few years in string theory. Our increased understanding of string theory should make the attempt to discover a stringy representation of QCD easier, and the methods explored in matrix models might be employed to study the large N limit of QCD.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- OSTI ID:
- 10149912
- Report Number(s):
- LBL-33232; CONF-9209333-1; ON: DE93010451; CNN: Grant PHY90-21984; TRN: 93:010795
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: STRINGS `92,Rome (Italy),2-8 Sep 1992; Other Information: PBD: Nov 1992
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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