By Vakhtang Gogokhia and Gergely Gabor Barnaföldi
World Scientific
Hardback: £65
E-book: £49
QCD is the most up-to-date theory of strong interactions. However, standard perturbative procedures fail if applied to low-energy QCD. Even the discovery of a Higgs boson will not solve the problem of masses originating from the non-perturbative behaviour of QCD. This book presents a new method – the introduction of the “mass gap” – first suggested by Arthur Jaffe and Edward Witten at the turn of the millennium. As the energy difference between the lowest order and the vacuum state in Yang–Mills quantum-field theory, the mass gap is – in principle – responsible for the large-scale structure of the QCD ground state, and therefore for its non-perturbative phenomena at low energies. The book also presents the applications and outlook of the mass-gap method and includes problems for students.
