Light-front holography and hadronization at the amplitude level

The correspondence between theories in anti - de Sitter space and conformal field theories in physical space-time leads to an analytic, semiclassical model for strongly-coupled QCD which has scale invariance at short distances and color confinement at large distances. Light-front holography is a remarkable feature of AdS/CFT: it allows hadronic amplitudes in the AdS fifth dimension to be mapped to frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons in physical space-time, thus providing a relativistic description of hadrons at the amplitude level. Some novel features of QCD are discussed, including the consequences of confinement for quark and gluon condensates and the behavior of the QCD coupling in the infrared. We suggest that the spatial support of QCD condensates is restricted to the interior of hadrons, since they arise due to the interactions of confined quarks and gluons. Chiral symmetry is thus broken in a limited domain of size 1/m_π, in analogy to the limited physical extent of superconductor phases. A new method for computing the hadronization of quark and gluon jets at the amplitude level, an event amplitude generator, is outlined.