The AdS/CFT Correspondence and Light-Front QCD

We identify an invariant light-front coordinate {zeta} which allows the separation of the dynamics of quark and gluon binding from the kinematics of constituent spin and internal orbital angular momentum. The result is a single-variable light-front Schroedinger equation for QCD which determines the eigenspectrum and the light-front wavefunctions of hadrons for general spin and orbital angular momentum. This frame-independent light-front wave equation is equivalent to the equations of motion which describe the propagation of spin-J modes on anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. 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. In principle, the model can be systematically improved by diagonalizing the full QCD light-front Hamiltonian on the AdS/QCD basis. Quark and gluon hadronization can be computed at the amplitude level by convoluting the off-shell T matrix calculated from the QCD light-front Hamiltonian with the hadronic light-front wavefunctions. We also note the distinction between static observables such as the probability distributions computed from the square of the light-front wavefunctions versus dynamical observables such as the structure functions and the leading-twistmore » single-spin asymmetries measured in deep inelastic scattering which include the effects of initial and final-state interactions.« less