Atomic physics and hadronic physics are both governed by the Yang Mills gauge theory Lagrangian; in fact, Abelian quantum electrodynamics can be regarded as the zero-color limit of quantum chromodynamics. I review a number of areas where the techniqu
es of atomic physics can provide important insight into hadronic eigenstates in QCD. For example, the Dirac-Coulomb equation, which predicts the spectroscopy and structure of hydrogenic atoms, has an analog in hadron physics in the form of frame-independent light-front relativistic equations of motion consistent with light-front holography which give a remarkable first approximation to the spectroscopy, dynamics, and structure of light hadrons. The production of antihydrogen in flight can provide important insight into the dynamics of hadron production in QCD at the amplitude level. The renormalization scale for the running coupling is unambiguously set in QED; an analogous procedure sets the renormalization scales in QCD, leading to scheme-independent scale-fixed predictions. Conversely, many techniques which have been developed for hadron physics, such as scaling laws, evolution equations, the quark-interchange process and light-front quantization have important applicants for atomic physics and photon science, especially in the relativistic domain.
The CMS collaboration at the LHC has reported a remarkable and unexpected phenomenon in very high-multiplicity high energy proton-proton collisions: a positive correlation between two particles produced at similar azimuthal angles, spanning a large r
ange in rapidity. We suggest that this ridge-like correlation may be a reflection of the rare events generated by the collision of aligned flux tubes connecting the valence quarks in the wave functions of the colliding protons. The spray of particles resulting from the approximate line source produced in such inelastic collisions then gives rise to events with a strong correlation between particles produced over a large range of both positive and negative rapidity. We suggest an additional variable that is sensitive to such a line source which is related to a commonly used measure, ellipticity.
Initial- and final-state rescattering, neglected in the parton model, have a profound effect in QCD hard-scattering reactions, predicting single-spin asymmetries, diffractive deep inelastic scattering, diffractive hard hadronic reactions, the breakdo
wn of the Lam Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions, and nuclear shadowing and non-universal antishadowing--leading-twist physics not incorporated in the light-front wavefunctions of the target computed in isolation. I also discuss the use of diffraction to materialize the Fock states of a hadronic projectile and test QCD color transparency, and anomalous heavy quark effects. The presence of direct higher-twist processes where a proton is produced in the hard subprocess can explain the large proton-to-pion ratio seen in high centrality heavy ion collisions. I emphasize the importance of distinguishing between static observables such as the probability distributions computed from the square of the light-front wavefunctions versus dynamical observables which include the effects of rescattering.
We present a new perspective on the nature of quark and gluon condensates in quantum chromodynamics. We suggest that the spatial support of QCD condensates is restricted to the interiors of hadrons, since these condensates arise due to the interactio
ns of confined quarks and gluons. An analogy is drawn with order parameters like the Cooper pair condensate and spontaneous magnetization experimentally measured in finite samples in condensed matter physics. Our picture explains the results of recent studies which find no significant signal for the vacuum gluon condensate. We also give a general discussion of condensates in asymptotically free vectorial and chiral gauge theories.
The correspondence between theories in anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories in physical space-time leads to an analytic, semiclassical model for strongly-coupled QCD which has scale invariance at short distances and color confinement at
large distances. Light-front holography is a remarkable feature of AdS/CFT: it allows hadronic amplitudes in the AdS fifth dimension to be mapped to frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons in physical space-time, thus providing a relativistic description of hadrons at the amplitude level. Some novel features of QCD are discussed, including the consequences of confinement for quark and gluon condensates and the behavior of the QCD coupling in the infrared. We suggest that the spatial support of QCD condensates is restricted to the interior of hadrons, since they arise due to the interactions of confined quarks and gluons. Chiral symmetry is thus broken in a limited domain of size of the inverse pion mass in analogy to the limited physical extent of superconductor phases. A new method for computing the hadronization of quark and gluon jets at the amplitude level, an event amplitude generator, is outlined.
