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AdS/QCD and Light Front Holography: A New Approximation to QCD

The combination of Anti-de Sitter space (AdS) methods with light-front holography leads to a semi-classical first approximation to the spectrum and wavefunctions of meson and baryon light-quark bound states. Starting from the bound-state Hamiltonian equation of motion in QCD, we derive relativistic light-front wave equations in terms of an invariant impact variable zeta which measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron at equal light-front time. These equations of motion in physical space-time are equivalent to the equations of motion which describe the propagation of spin-J modes in anti--de Sitter (AdS) space. Its eigenvalues give the hadronic spectrum, and its eigenmodes represent the probability distributions of the hadronic constituents at a given scale. Applications to the light meson and baryon spectra are presented. The predicted meson spectrum has a string-theory Regge form ${\cal M}^2 = 4 κ^2(n+L+S/2)$; i.e., the square of the eigenmass is linear in both L and n, where n counts the number of nodes of the wavefunction in the radial variable zeta. The space-like pion and nucleon form factors are also well reproduced. One thus obtains a remarkable connection between the description of hadronic modes in AdS space and the Hamiltonian formulation of QCD in physical space-time quantized on the light-front at fixed light-front time. The model can be systematically improved by using its complete orthonormal solutions to diagonalize the full QCD light-front Hamiltonian or by applying the Lippmann-Schwinger method in order to systematically include the QCD interaction terms.