Testing Quantum Chromodynamics with Antiprotons

The antiproton storage ring HESR to be constructed at GSI will open up a new range of perturbative and nonperturbative tests of QCD in exclusive and inclusive reactions. I discuss 21 tests of QCD using antiproton beams which can illuminate novel features of QCD. The proposed experiments include the formation of exotic hadrons, measurements of timelike generalized parton distributions, the production of charm at threshold, transversity measurements in Drell-Yan reactions, and searches for single-spin asymmetries. The interactions of antiprotons in nuclear targets will allow tests of exotic nuclear phenomena such as color transparency, hidden color, reduced nuclear amplitudes, and the non-universality of nuclear antishadowing. The central tool used in these lectures are light-front Fock state wavefunctions which encode the bound-state properties of hadrons in terms of their quark and gluon degrees of freedom at the amplitude level. The freedom to choose the light-like quantization four-vector provides an explicitly covariant formulation of light-front quantization and can be used to determine the analytic structure of light-front wave functions. QCD becomes scale free and conformally symmetric in the analytic limit of zero quark mass and zero β function. This “conformal correspondence principle” determines the form of the expansion polynomials for distribution amplitudes and the behavior of non-perturbative wavefunctions which control hard exclusive processes at leading twist. The conformal template also can be used to derive commensurate scale relations which connect observables in QCD without scale or scheme ambiguity. The AdS/CFT correspondence of large NC supergravity theory in higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter space with supersymmetric QCD in 4-dimensional space-time has important implications for hadron phenomenology in the conformal limit, including the nonperturbative derivation of counting rules for exclusive processes and the behavior of structure functions at large xbj . String/gauge duality also predicts the QCD power-law fall-off of light-front Fock-state hadronic wavefunctions with arbitrary orbital angular momentum at high momentum transfer. I also review recent work which shows that the diffractive component of deep inelastic scattering, single spin asymmetries, as well as nuclear shadowing and antishadowing, cannot be computed from the LFWFs of hadrons in isolation.