AdS/QCD, LIight-Front Holography, and the Non-perturbative Running Coupling

The combination of Anti-de Sitter space (AdS) methods with light-front (LF) holography provides a remarkably accurate first approximation for the spectra and wavefunctions of meson and baryon light-quark bound states. The resulting bound-state Hamiltonian equation of motion in QCD leads to relativistic light-front wave equations in terms of an invariant impact variable {zeta} which measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron at equal light-front time. These equations of motion in physical space-time are equivalent to the equations of motion which describe the propagation of spin-J modes in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. The eigenvalues give the hadronic spectrum, and the eigenmodes represent the probability distributions of the hadronic constituents at a given scale. A positive-sign confining dilaton background modifying AdS space gives a very good account of meson and baryon spectroscopy and form factors. The light-front holographic mapping of this model also leads to a non-perturbative effective coupling {alpha}{sub s}{sup Ads} (Q{sup 2}) which agrees with the effective charge defined by the Bjorken sum rule and lattice simulations. It displays a transition from perturbative to nonperturbative conformal regimes at a momentum scale {approx} 1 GeV. The resulting {beta}-function appears to capture the essential characteristics of themore » full {beta}-function of QCD, thus giving further support to the application of the gauge/gravity duality to the confining dynamics of strongly coupled QCD.« less