Bridges from Lattice QCD to Nuclear Physics

A. M. Green

Published 2004-09-10Version 1

A review is given of attempts to bridge the gap between everyday particle and nuclear physics - involving many quarks - and the basic underlying theory of QCD that can only be evaluated exactly for few quark systems. Even the latter requires the original theory of QCD to be discretised to give Lattice QCD - but this modification can still yield exact results for the original theory. These LQCD results can then be considered on a similar footing to experimental data - namely as cornerstones that must be fitted by phenomenological models. In this way, the hope is that "QCD inspired" models can become more and more "QCD based" models, by fixing - in the few-quark case where LQCD can be carried out - the form of these models in such a way that they can be extended to multi-quark systems.