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Title: Light-Front-Quantized QCD in Light-Cone Gauge

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/784819· OSTI ID:784819

The light-front (LF) quantization of QCD in 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. We present a systematic study of LF-quantized gauge theory following the Dirac method and construct the Dyson-Wick S-matrix expansion based on LF-time-ordered products. The gauge field is shown to satisfy the Lorentz condition as an operator equation as well as the light-cone gauge condition. Its propagator is found to be transverse with respect to both its four-momentum and the gauge direction. The propagator of the dynamical {psi}{sub +} part of the free fermionic field is shown to be causal and to not contain instantaneous terms. The interaction Hamiltonian of QCD can be expressed in a form resembling that of covariant theory, except for additional instantaneous interactions which can be treated systematically. The renormalization factors are shown to be scalars and we find Z{sub 1} = Z{sub 3} at one loop order. The running coupling constant and QCD {beta} function are also computed in the noncovariant light-cone gauge. Some comments on the relationship of our LF framework to the analytic effective charge and renormalization scheme defined by the pinch technique are made. LF quantization thus provides a consistent formulation of gauge theory, despite the fact that the hyperplanes x{sup {+-}} = 0 used to impose boundary conditions constitute characteristic surfaces of a hyperbolic partial differential equation.

Research Organization:
SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Research (ER) (US)
DOE Contract Number:
AC03-76SF00515
OSTI ID:
784819
Report Number(s):
SLAC-PUB-8711; TRN: US0108784
Resource Relation:
Other Information: PBD: 30 Nov 2000
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English