2001/09/27 by Jonathan Osborne, Osborne, Jonathan
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/0109255
319 pages, 29 figures
openalex publication_date 2001/09/27 · arxiv created 2001/11/29 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
I present an introduction to the field of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) with emphasis on nucleon spin structure and perturbative methods. After a somewhat comprehensive overview of perturbative QCD, including the systematics of renormalization, I introduce deeply-inelastic scattering and deeply-virtual Compton scattering along with the nonperturbative distribution functions appearing in these processes. I show how these processes can be used to extract the distribution of longitudinal spin of nucleons, and briefly discuss the complications associated with transverse spin components. There are five appendices which accompany this work, discussing topics ranging from canonical field quantization to dimensional regularization to the structure of several important Lie groups. These appendices are meant to give the reader a certain basic understanding of some of the mathematical details underlying the main text, as well as provide a useful reference. This work was submitted in a slightly different form to the University of Maryland at College Park in partial completion of the requirements for a doctor of philosophy in physics, received August 2000.