AdS/CFT and Light-Front QCD

Understand

The AdS/CFT correspondence between string theory in AdS space and conformal field theories in physical space-time leads to an analytic, semi-classical model for strongly-coupled QCD which has scale invariance and dimensional counting at short distances and color confinement at large distances.

• The AdS/CFT correspondence also provides insights into the inherently nonperturbative aspects of QCD such as the orbital and radial spectra of hadrons and the form of hadronic wavefunctions.
• In particular, we show that there is an exact correspondence between the fifth-dimensional coordinate of AdS space $z$ and a specific impact variable $\zeta$ which measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron in ordinary space-time.
• This connection leads to AdS/CFT predictions for the analytic form of the frame-independent light-front wavefunctions (LFWFs) of mesons and baryons, the fundamental entities which encode hadron properties.