Light Front QCD

In these lectures, I survey a number of applications of light-front methods to hadron and nuclear physics phenomenology and dynamics, including light-front statistical physics. Light-front Fock-state wavefunctions provide a frame-independent representation of hadrons in terms of their fundamental quark and gluon degrees of freedom. Nonperturbative methods for computing LFWFs in QCD are discussed, including string/gauge duality which predicts the power-law fall-off at high momentum transfer of light-front Fock-state hadronic wavefunctions with an arbitrary number of constituents and orbital angular momentum. The AdS/CFT correspondence has important implications for hadron phenomenology in the conformal limit, including an all-orders derivation of counting rules for exclusive processes. One can also compute the hadronic spectrum of near-conformal QCD assuming a truncated AdS/CFT space. Given the LFWFs, one can compute form factors, heavy hadron decay amplitudes, hadron distribution amplitudes, and the generalized parton distributions underlying deeply virtual Compton scattering. The quantum fluctuations represented by the light-front Fock expansion leads to novel QCD phenomena such as color transparency, intrinsic heavy quark distributions, diffractive dissociation, and hidden-color components of nuclear wavefunctions. A new test of hidden color in deuteron photodisintegration is proposed. The origin of leading-twist phenomena such as the diffractive component of deep inelastic scattering, single-spin asymmetries, nuclear shadowing and antishadowing is also discussed; these phenomena cannot be described by lightfront wavefunctions of the target computed in isolation. Part of the anomalous NuTeV results for the weak mixing angle θW could be due to the non-universality of nuclear antishadowing for charged and neutral currents.