QCD Phenomenology and Light-Front 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, diffractive dissociation into jets, and deeply virtual Compton scattering. The relation of the intrinsic sea to the light-front wavefunctions is discussed. Light-front quantization can also be used in the Hamiltonian form to construct an event generator for high energy physics reactions at the amplitude level. The light-cone partition function, summed over exponentially weighted light-cone energies, has simple boost properties which may be useful for studies in heavy ion collisions. I also review recent work which shows that the structure functions measured in deep inelastic lepton scattering are affected by final-state rescattering, thus modifying their connection to light-front probability distributions. In particular, the shadowing of nuclear structure functions is due to destructive interference effects from leading-twist diffraction of the virtual photon, physics not included in the nuclear light-cone wavefunctions.
- 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:
- 798925
- Report Number(s):
- SLAC-PUB-9056; TRN: US0205091
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 21 Nov 2001
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
GENERAL PHYSICS
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS
BOUND STATE
COMPTON EFFECT
DEGREES OF FREEDOM
HEAVY IONS
HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS
LIGHT CONE
MOMENTUM TRANSFER
NUCLEAR STRUCTURE
PARTITION FUNCTIONS
QUANTUM CHROMODYNAMICS
QUANTUM FIELD THEORY
STRUCTURE FUNCTIONS