New Perspectives for QCD Physics at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent challenges to conventional QCD concepts at the LHC, highlighting soft-gluon effects, direct hadron production, intrinsic charm, and novel theoretical approaches impacting collider physics and cosmology.

Contribution

It introduces new perspectives on QCD phenomena, including breakdown of factorization, direct hadron production mechanisms, and applications of AdS/QCD wavefunctions, advancing understanding of hadron physics at high energies.

Findings

Soft-gluon rescattering causes single-spin asymmetries.

Direct hadron production explains deviations from pQCD.

Intrinsic charm accounts for high p_T photon plus charm-jet events.

Abstract

I review a number of topics where conventional wisdom relevant to hadron physics at the LHC has been challenged. For example, the initial-state and final-state interactions of the quarks and gluons entering perturbative QCD hard-scattering subprocesses lead to the breakdown of traditional concepts of factorization and universality for transverse-momentum-dependent observables at leading twist. These soft-gluon rescattering effect produce single-spin asymmetries, the breakdown of the Lam-Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions, as well as diffractive deep inelastic scattering, The antishadowing of nuclear structure functions is predicted to depend on the flavor quantum numbers of each quark and antiquark. Isolated hadrons can be produced at large transverse momentum directly within a hard higher-twist QCD subprocess, rather than from jet fragmentation, even at the LHC. Such "direct" processes can explain the observed deviations from pQCD predictions of the power-law fall-off of inclusive hadron cross sections as well as the "baryon anomaly" seen in high-centrality heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. The intrinsic charm contribution to the proton structure function at high x can explain the large rate for high p_T photon plus charm-jet events observed at the Tevatron and imply a large production rate for charm and bottom jets at high p_T at the LHC, as well as a novel mechanism for Higgs and Z^0 production at high x_F. The light-front wavefunctions derived in AdS/QCD can be used to calculate jet hadronization at the amplitude level. The elimination of the renormalization scale ambiguity for the QCD coupling using the scheme-independent BLM method will increase the sensitivity of searches for new physics at the LHC. The implications of "in-hadron condensates" for the QCD contribution to the cosmological constant are also discussed.