New Results in Light-Front Phenomenology

Abstract

The light-front quantization of gauge theories in light-cone gauge provides a frameindependent wavefunction representation of relativistic bound states, simple forms for current matrix elements, explicit unitarity, and a trivial vacuum. In this talk I review the theoretical methods and constraints which can be used to determine these central elements of QCD phenomenology. The freedom to choose the light-like quantization four-vector provides an explicitly covariant formulation of light-front quantization and can be used to determine the analytic structure of light-front wave functions and define a kinematical definition of angular momentum. The AdS/CFT correspondence of large N C supergravity theory in higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter space with supersymmetric QCD in 4-dimensional space-time has interesting implications for hadron phenomenology in the conformal limit, including an all-orders demonstration of counting rules for exclusive processes. String/gauge duality also predicts the QCD power-law behavior of light-front Fock-state hadronic wavefunctions with arbitrary orbital angular momentum at high momentum transfer. The form of these nearconformal wavefunctions can be used as an initial ansatz for a variational treatment of the light-front QCD Hamiltonian. The light-front Fock-state wavefunctions encode the bound state properties of hadrons in terms of their quark and gluon degrees of freedom at the amplitude level. The nonperturbative Fock state wavefunctions contain intrinsic gluons, and sea quarks at any scale Q with asymmetries such as s(x) =s(x),ū(x) =d(x). Intrinsic charm and bottom quarks appear at large x in the light-front wavefunctions since this minimizes the invariant mass and off-shellness of the higher Fock state. In the case of nuclei, the Fock state expansion contains "hidden color" states which cannot be classified in terms of nucleonic degrees of freedom. I also briefly review recent analyses which shows that some leading-twist phenomena such as the diffractive component of deep inelastic scattering, single-spin asymmetries, nuclear shadowing and antishadowing cannot be computed from the LFWFs of hadrons in isolation.2