New Perspectives for QCD from AdS/CFT.

Book excerpt: The AdS/CFT correspondence between conformal field theory and string states in an extended space-time has provided new insights into not only hadron spectra, but also their light-front wavefunctions. We show that there is an exact correspondence between the fifth-dimensional coordinate of anti-de Sitter space z and a specific impact variable {zeta} which measures the separation of the constituents within the hadron in ordinary space-time. This connection allows one to predict the form of the light-front wavefunctions of mesons and baryons, the fundamental entities which encode hadron properties and scattering amplitudes. A new relativistic Schroedinger light-cone equation is found which reproduces the results obtained using the fifth-dimensional theory.