New Results in Light-Front Phenomenology

The light-front quantization of gauge theories such as QCD in light-cone gauge provides a frame-independent wavefunction representation of relativistic bound states, simple forms for current matrix elements, explicit unitarity, and a trivial vacuum. 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 and to define a kinematical definition of angular momentum. The AdS/CFT correspondence of large $N_C$ supergravity theory in higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter space with supersymmetric QCD in 4-dimensional space-time has interesting implications for hadron phenomenology in the conformal limit, including an all-orders demonstration of counting rules for exclusive processes. String/gauge duality also predicts the QCD power-law behavior of light-front Fock-state hadronic wavefunctions with arbitrary orbital angular momentum at high momentum transfer. The form of these near-conformal wavefunctions can be used as an initial ansatz for a variational treatment of the light-front QCD Hamiltonian. I also briefly review recent analyses which shows that some leading-twist phenomena such as the diffractive component of deep inelastic scattering, single-spin asymmetries, nuclear shadowing and antishadowing cannot be computed from the LFWFs of hadrons in isolation.