Novel QCD Phenomena at JLab

TL;DR

This paper discusses a wide range of novel QCD phenomena accessible at JLab with 12 GeV electrons, including tests of nuclear structure, exotic hadrons, and fundamental QCD features, advancing understanding of strong interactions.

Contribution

It introduces new experimental and theoretical opportunities at JLab to explore both perturbative and nonperturbative QCD phenomena, including supersymmetry and holographic models.

Findings

Flavor dependence of nuclear structure functions suggests non-universality.

Shadowing and antishadowing may violate sum rules.

Light-front holography predicts the QCD coupling in the nonperturbative domain.

Abstract

The $12~$GeV electron beam energy at Jefferson Laboratory provides ideal electroproduction kinematics for many novel tests of QCD in both the perturbative and nonperturbative domains. These include tests of the quark flavor dependence of the nuclear structure functions; measurements of the QCD running coupling at soft scales; measurements of the diffractive deep inelastic structure function; measurements of exclusive contributions to the $T-$ odd Sivers function; the identification of ``odderon" contributions; tests of the spectroscopic and dynamic features of light-front holography, as well as ``meson-nucleon supersymmetry"; the production of open and hidden charm states in the heavy-quark threshold domain; and the production of exotic hadronic states such as pentaquarks, tetraquarks and even octoquarks containing charm quarks. One can also study fundamental features of QCD at JLab$12$ such as the ``hidden color" of nuclear wavefunctions, the ``color transparency" of hard exclusive processes, and the ``intrinsic strangeness and charm" content of the proton wavefunction. I will also discuss evidence that the antishadowing of nuclear structure functions is non-universal; i.e., flavor dependent. I will also present arguments why shadowing and antishadowing phenomena may be incompatible with the momentum and other sum rules for the nuclear parton distribution functions. I will also briefly review new insights into the hadron mass scale, the hadron mass spectrum, the functional form of the QCD coupling in the nonperturbative domain predicted by light-front holography, and how superconformal algebra leads to remarkable supersymmetric relations between mesons and baryons.