Boundary of Nuclear Physics and QCD

Anthony W. Thomas

Published 2001-11-01Version 1

Recent progress in lattice QCD, combined with the imminent advent of a new generation of dedicated supercomputers and advances in chiral extrapolation mean that the next few years will bring quite novel insights into hadron structure. We review some of the recent highlights in this field, the questions which might be addressed and the experiments which may be expected to stretch that understanding to its limits. Only with a sound understanding of hadron structure can one hope to explore the fundamental issue of how that structure may change at finite density (or temperature). We explore potential future insights from lattice QCD into the phenomenon of nuclear saturation and a very important hint from recent data of a change in the structure of a bound nucleon.