Hadron Physics and Dyson-Schwinger Equations

Abstract

Detailed investigations of the structure of hadrons are essential for understanding how matter is constructed from the quarks and gluons of QCD, and amongst the questions posed to modern hadron physics, three stand out. What is the rigorous, quantitative mechanism responsible for confinement? What is the connection between confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking? And are these phenomena together sufficient to explain the origin of more than 98% of the mass of the observable universe? Such questions may only be answered using the full machinery of nonperturbative relativistic quantum field theory. These lecture notes provide an introduction to the application of Dyson-Schwinger equations in this context, and a perspective on progress toward answering these key questions.

103 pages, 23 figures; lecture notes contributed to the proceedings of the 20th Annual Hampton University Graduate Studies Program (HUGS 2005), JLab, 31 May - 17 Jun 2005