An Introduction to the Schwinger-Dyson/Bound State Equation Approach to QCD

by Prof. Pennington Michael (Jefferson Laboratory, USA)

Monday 29 Jun 2015, 14:15 → 15:45 Europe/Berlin

3344 (TUM - Physics Department - Garching)

The Schwinger-Dyson equations describe the behaviour of the basic particles and their interactions in a field theory. In QCD these equations determine the behaviour of the quark, gluon, and ghost propagators over all distance scales from the region of asymptotic freedom to confinement. In turn these basic Green’s functions are the building blocks for studies of bound states, determining the properties, structure and interactions of hadrons. This continuum approach to strong coupling QCD has the advantage that it can be readily applied to quarks of any mass. Consequently it naturally links heavy flavors to light quarks with physical masses and chiral symmetry breaking. However approximations of necessity have to be made. In this talk I will attempt to give a pedagogical introduction to the current outstanding issues, to give a sense of the progress made and where there are unsubstantiated assumptions. This means, that despite some notable phenomenological successes, we do not yet have a self-consistent treatment in this interesting approach to hadron physics.