University of Costa Rica

Understanding the structure of hadrons in terms of their fundamental constituents requires an understanding of QCD at large distances, a vastly complex and unsolved dynamical problem. I will discuss in this talk a new approach to hadron structure based on superconformal quantum mechanics in the light-front and its holographic embedding in a higher dimensional gravity theory. This approach captures essential aspects of the confinement dynamics which are not apparent from the QCD Lagrangian, such as the emergence of a mass scale and confinement, the occurrence of a zero mode: the pion, universal Regge trajectories for mesons and baryons and precise connections between the light meson and nucleon spectra. This effective semiclassical approach to relativistic bound-state equations in QCD can be extended to heavy-light hadrons where heavy quark masses break the conformal invariance but the underlying dynamical supersymmetry holds.