Speaker
Description
The deuteron, as the lightest nuclear bound state, provides a unique laboratory for investigating the transition from conventional nuclear degrees of freedom to quark-gluon dynamics in nuclei. In this work, we explore QCD effects in the deuteron beyond the traditional proton-neutron description by incorporating hidden-color configurations within a light-front framework. Using a separation-of-variables approach, transverse confinement is modeled through light-front holography, while longitudinal dynamics are governed by the 't Hooft equation. This framework enables the investigation of the deuteron’s internal structure in terms of quark degrees of freedom and allows the calculation of electromagnetic form factors together with unpolarized, polarized, and tensor-polarized structure functions. We discuss the role of hidden-color correlations and their implications for the spin structure and partonic dynamics of the deuteron.
Complementarily, efforts are also underway within the basis light-front quantization framework to describe the deuteron directly at the partonic level through truncated six-quark and six-quark--one-gluon Fock sectors, providing further insight into its nonperturbative quark-gluon dynamics.