Simulational Methods in Physics

# Light Cone Lattice QCD

We will investigate QCD in "close to the light cone'' formulation applying lattice gauge theory methods. Such a formulation is natural for the description of high-energy scattering experiments. Our formulation contains an additional parameter which describes the distance to the light cone and thus varies the energy. The ground state wave function, i.e., the QCD vacuum will be calculated numerically with a diffusion quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. Using the ground state wave function the vacuum expectation value of Wegner-Wilson loops can thus be determined as a function of the energy. These expectation values can be used to determine cross sections for meson-meson scattering using a lattice simulation.

The main task now is to investigate improvements and consequences of this basic approach: Is it possible to eliminate the constrained equation arising in the light cone limit by inverting the covariant x-derivative operator on the lattice? Can the lattice Hamiltonian or the variational method be improved to find a better scaling property of the string tension? What kind of simple configurations can be explored with the vacuum solution?