QCD Green's Functions, Confinement and Phenomenology

In the third edition of the QCD-TNT workshop the traditional focus of the last two editions (that is gaining a firmer grasp on the infrared behavior of the QCD Green's functions) will be slightly shifted towards attempts to implement the transition from the fundamental (quarks and gluons) to the effective (mesons and hadrons) degrees of freedom. So in addition to the traditional QCD-TNT themes (e.g., confinement, gluon mass generation, lattice simulations in different gauges, QCD at finite temperature and density) we plan to have more phenomenologically oriented topics (e.g., experimental reviews, determination of form factors from first principle, construction of Bethe-Salpeter kernels). In addition, a special session will be dedicated to review talks, summarizing the state-of-the-art, as well as highlighting the future perspectives, of simulating non-Abelian gauge fields using ultracold neutral atoms trapped in optical lattices, and other systems.

QCD-TNT-II will address critically the hard problems that remain unsolved in QCD, connecting non-perturbative continuum and lattice ideas in new and original ways. The general themes of the workshop include this time the understanding confinement, chiral symmetry breakdown, and the nature of topological charge, for all of which there is more than one plausible scenario. All these phenomena are non-perturbative and probe the strongly-coupled infrared region of QCD. We look for ways to reconcile apparent discrepancies in various schools of thought, with an emphasis on enforcing gauge invariance, and for lattice simulations in specially-constructed scenarios that can accurately compare and contrast the proposed non-perturbative mechanisms of QCD.

The general theme of the workshop concerns techniques for gauge-invariant calculations of off-shell Green's functions in non-Abelian gauge theories such as QCD, and their relationship to other approaches to QCD, including lattice simulations and phenomenology. Of critical interest is the infrared behavior of such gauge theories, where all non-perturbative phenomena (confinement, chiral symmetry breakdown, non-integral topological charge) have their roots. We especially hope that the lattice and the continuum communities will find at the Workshop, and later explore, new ways of this most difficult problem of non-perturbative QCD.