The AdS/QCD Correspondence and Exclusive Processes

TL;DR

This paper explores how the AdS/QCD correspondence provides a semi-classical, analytic model for nonperturbative QCD phenomena, enabling calculations of hadron properties and exclusive scattering processes with predictions matching experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a modified soft-wall AdS/QCD model combined with light-front holography to analytically describe hadron dynamics, form factors, and exclusive processes in QCD.

Findings

Predicts linear Regge trajectories for mesons and baryons.

Derives a non-perturbative effective coupling consistent with experimental data.

Provides analytic light-front wavefunctions for hadrons.

Abstract

The AdS/CFT correspondence between theories in AdS space and conformal field theories in physical space-time provides an analytic, semi-classical, color-confining model for strongly-coupled QCD. The soft-wall AdS/QCD model modified by a positive-sign dilaton metric leads to a remarkable one-parameter description of nonperturbative hadron dynamics at zero quark mass, including a zero-mass pion and a Regge spectrum of linear trajectories with the same slope in orbital angular momentum $L$ and radial quantum number $n$ for both mesons and baryons. One also predicts the form of the non-perturbative effective coupling $\alpha_s^{AdS}(Q)$ and its $\beta$-function which agrees with the effective coupling $\alpha_{g_1}$ extracted from the Bjorken sum rule. Light-front holography, which connects the fifth-dimensional coordinate of AdS space $z$ to an invariant impact separation variable $\zeta$, allows one to compute the analytic form of the frame-independent light-front wavefunctions, the fundamental entities which encode hadron properties as well as decay constants, form factors, deeply virtual Compton scattering, exclusive heavy hadron decays and other exclusive scattering amplitudes. One thus obtains a relativistic description of hadrons in QCD at the amplitude level with dimensional counting for hard exclusive reactions at high momentum transfer. As specific examples we discuss the behavior of the pion and nucleon form factors in the space-like and time-like regions. We also review the phenomenology of exclusive processes including some anomalous empirical results.