Hadronic structure on the light front. II. QCD strings, Wilson lines, and potentials

Abstract

This is the second paper on hadronic wave functions in the light-front formulation. We first consider only confinement effects, using the classical Nambu-Gotto string with massive end points in the light-cone gauge. We derive the light-front Hamiltonian and show how to solve it, using an expansion in suitable basis functions. We next discuss the correlators of Wilson lines on the light front, leading to an effective Hamiltonian that includes spin effects. At the end, we consider a separate problem of instanton-induced interactions, at the origin of the pion as a massless Goldstone mode on the light front.