The Parton Model and its Applications

This is a review of the program we started in 1968 to understand and generalize Bjorken scaling and Feynman's parton model in a canonical quantum field theory. It is shown that the parton model proposed for deep inelastic electron scatterings can be derived if a transverse momentum cutoff is imposed on all particles in the theory so that the impulse approximation holds. The deep inelastic electron-positron annihilation into a nucleon plus anything else is related by the crossing symmetry of quantum field theory to the deep inelastic electron-nucleon scattering. We have investigated the implication of crossing symmetry and found that the structure functions satisfy a scaling behavior analogous to the Bjorken limit for deep inelastic electron scattering. We then find that massive lepton pair production in collisions of two high energy hadrons can be treated by the parton model with an interesting scaling behavior for the differential cross sections. This turns out to be the first example of a class of hard processes involving two initial hadrons.Comment: Contribution to a book to be published by World Scientific for the occasion of 50 Years of Quarks. 17 pages, 4 figure

Comment on "Light-front Schwinger model at finite temperature"

In a recent paper by A. Das and X. Zhou [Phys. Rev. D 68, 065017 (2003)] it is claimed that explicit evaluation of the thermal photon self-energy in the Schwinger model gives off-shell thermal Green functions that are different in light-front and conventional quantizations. We show that the claimed difference originates from an erroneous simplification of the fermion propagator used in the light-front calculation.Comment: 8 pages, revtex4, added section refuting the massless limit proposed in hep-th/031102

Self Consistent 1/Nc1/N_c Expansion In The Presence Of Electroweak Interactions

In the conventional approach to the $1/N_c$ expansion, electroweak interactions are switched off and large $N_c$ QCD is treated in isolation. We study the self-consistency of taking the large $N_c$ limit in the presence of electroweak interaction. If the electroweak coupling constants are held constant, the large $N_c$ counting rules are violated by processes involving internal photon or weak boson lines. Anomaly cancellations, however, fix the ratio of electric charges of different fermions. This allows a self-consistent way to scale down the electronic charge $e$ in the large $N_c$ limit and hence restoring the validity of the large $N_c$ counting rules.Comment: 9 pages in REVTeX, no figure

CKM Favored Semileptonic Decays of Heavy Hadrons at Zero Recoil

We study the properties of Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) favored semileptonic decays of mesons and baryons containing a heavy quark at the point of no recoil. We first use a diagrammatic analysis to rederive the result observed by earlier authors that at this kinematic point the $B$ meson decays via $b\to c$ transitions can only produce a $D$ or $D^*$ meson. The result is generalized to include photon emissions which violate heavy quark flavor symmetry. We show that photons emitted by the heavy quarks and the charged lepton are the only light particles that can decorate the decays $\bar{B}\to D(D^*) + \ell\nu$ at zero recoil, and the similar processes of heavy baryons. Implications for the determinations of the CKM parameter $V_{cb}$ are discussed. Also studied in this paper is the connection between our diagrammatic analysis of suppression of particle emission and the formal observation based on weak currents at zero recoil being generators of heavy quark symmetry. We show that the two approaches can be unified by considering the Isgur-Wise function in the presence of an external source.Comment: 27 pages, including 11 figures using macros FEYNMAN.te