Hadron Bound States and Heavy Flavor Physics

The confinement regime of QCD is the least understood sector of the Standard Model. It is in the arena that the properties of mesons, baryons, hybrid and glueball states are defined. Perturbation methods are of little use here, but progress is made using chiral symmetry, analytic properties, and emerging non-perturbative tools. Of the latter, the QCD string approximation to QCD in the confinement region, and rapidly improving lattice simulation techniques are important.

In the Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET), numerous hadron form factors appear. These form factors are not calculable in HQET and are also determined by bound-state dynamics. These form factors are of great importance in the interpretation of data from the B-factories in California and Japan that have just commenced oepration.