Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory of quarks and gluons, whose interactions can be described by a local SU(3) gauge symmetry with charges called “color quantum numbers”, is reviewed; the goal of this review is to provide advanced Ph.D. students a comprehensive handbook, helpful for their research. When QCD was “discovered” 50 years ago, the idea that quarks could exist, but not be observed, left most physicists unconvinced. Then, with the discovery of charmonium in 1974 and the explanation of its excited states using the Cornell potential, consisting of the sum of a Coulomb-like attraction and a long range linear confining potential, the theory was suddenly widely accepted. This paradigm shift is now referred to as the November revolution. It had been anticipated by the observation of scaling in deep inelastic scattering, and was followed by the discovery of gluons in three-jet events. The parameters of QCD include the running coupling constant,  $$\alpha _s(Q^2)$$  <math> <mrow> <msub> <mi>α</mi> <mi>s</mi> </msub> <mrow> <mo>(</mo> <msup> <mi>Q</mi> <mn>2</mn> </msup> <mo>)</mo> </mrow> </mrow> </math>  , that varies with the energy scale  $$Q^2$$  <math> <msup> <mi>Q</mi> <mn>2</mn> </msup> </math>   characterising the interaction, and six quark masses. QCD cannot be solved analytically, at least not yet, and the large value of  $$\alpha _s$$  <math> <msub> <mi>α</mi> <mi>s</mi> </msub> </math>   at low momentum transfers limits perturbative calculations to the high-energy region where  $$Q^2\gg \varLambda _{{\textrm{QCD}}} ^2\simeq $$  <math> <mrow> <msup> <mi>Q</mi> <mn>2</mn> </msup> <mo>≫</mo> <msubsup> <mi>Λ</mi> <mrow> <mtext>QCD</mtext> </mrow> <mn>2</mn> </msubsup> <mo>≃</mo> </mrow> </math>   (250 MeV) $$^2$$  <math> <msup> <mrow></mrow> <mn>2</mn> </msup> </math>  . Lattice QCD (LQCD), numerical calculations on a discretized space-time lattice, is discussed in detail, the dynamics of the QCD vacuum is visualized, and the expected spectra of mesons and baryons are displayed. Progress in lattice calculations of the structure of nucleons and of quantities related to the phase diagram of dense and hot (or cold) hadronic matter are reviewed. Methods and examples of how to calculate hadronic corrections to weak matrix elements on a lattice are outlined. The wide variety of analytical approximations currently in use, and the accuracy of these approximations, are reviewed. These methods range from the Bethe–Salpeter, Dyson–Schwinger coupled relativistic equations, which are formulated in both Minkowski or Euclidean spaces, to expansions of multi-quark states in a set of basis functions using light-front coordinates, to the AdS/QCD method that imbeds 4-dimensional QCD in a 5-dimensional deSitter space, allowing confinement and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking to be described in a novel way. Models that assume the number of colors is very large, i.e. make use of the large  $$N_c$$  <math> <msub> <mi>N</mi> <mi>c</mi> </msub> </math>  -limit, give unique insights. Many other techniques that are tailored to specific problems, such as perturbative expansions for high energy scattering or approximate calculations using the operator product expansion are discussed. The very powerful effective field theory techniques that are successful for low energy nuclear systems (chiral effective theory), or for non-relativistic systems involving heavy quarks, or the treatment of gluon exchanges between energetic, collinear partons encountered in jets, are discussed. The spectroscopy of mesons and baryons has played an important historical role in the development of QCD. The famous X,Y,Z states – and the discovery of pentaquarks – have revolutionized hadron spectroscopy; their status and interpretation are reviewed as well as recent progress in the identification of glueballs and hybrids in light-meson spectroscopy. These exotic states add to the spectrum of expected  $$q{{\bar{q}}}$$  <math> <mrow> <mi>q</mi> <mover> <mrow> <mi>q</mi> </mrow> <mrow> <mo>¯</mo> </mrow> </mover> </mrow> </math>   mesons and qqq baryons. The progress in understanding excitations of light and heavy baryons is discussed. The nucleon as the lightest baryon is discussed extensively, its form factors, its partonic structure and the status of the attempt to determine a three-dimensional picture of the parton distribution. An experimental program to study the phase diagram of QCD at high temperature and density started with fixed target experiments in various laboratories in the second half of the 1980s, and then, in this century, with colliders. QCD thermodynamics at high temperature became accessible to LQCD, and numerical results on chiral and deconfinement transitions and properties of the deconfined and chirally restored form of strongly interacting matter, called the Quark–Gluon Plasma (QGP), have become very precise by now. These results can now be confronted with experimental data that are sensitive to the nature of the phase transition. There is clear evidence that the QGP phase is created. This phase of QCD matter can already be characterized by some properties that indicate, within a temperature range of a few times the pseudocritical temperature, the medium behaves like a near ideal liquid. Experimental observables are presented that demonstrate deconfinement. High and ultrahigh density QCD matter at moderate and low temperatures shows interesting features and new phases that are of astrophysical relevance. They are reviewed here and some of the astrophysical implications are discussed. Perturbative QCD and methods to describe the different aspects of scattering processes are discussed. The primary parton–parton scattering in a collision is calculated in perturbative QCD with increasing complexity. The radiation of soft gluons can spoil the perturbative convergence, this can be cured by resummation techniques, which are also described here. Realistic descriptions of QCD scattering events need to model the cascade of quark and gluon splittings until hadron formation sets in, which is done by parton showers. The full event simulation can be performed with Monte Carlo event generators, which simulate the full chain from the hard interaction to the hadronic final states, including the modelling of non-perturbative components. The contribution of the LEP experiments (and of earlier collider experiments) to the study of jets is reviewed. Correlations between jets and the shape of jets had allowed the collaborations to determine the “color factors” – invariants of the SU(3) color group governing the strength of quark–gluon and gluon–gluon interactions. The calculated jet production rates (using perturbative QCD) are shown to agree precisely with data, for jet energies spanning more than five orders of magnitude. The production of jets recoiling against a vector boson,  $$W^\pm $$  <math> <msup> <mi>W</mi> <mo>±</mo> </msup> </math>   or Z, is shown to be well understood. The discovery of the Higgs boson was certainly an important milestone in the development of high-energy physics. The couplings of the Higgs boson to massive vector bosons and fermions that have been measured so far support its interpretation as mass-generating boson as predicted by the Standard Model. The study of the Higgs boson recoiling against hadronic jets (without or with heavy flavors) or against vector bosons is also highlighted. Apart from the description of hard interactions taking place at high energies, the understanding of “soft QCD” is also very important. In this respect, Pomeron – and Odderon – exchange, soft and hard diffraction are discussed. Weak decays of quarks and leptons, the quark mixing matrix and the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon are processes which are governed by weak interactions. However, corrections by strong interactions are important, and these are reviewed. As the measured values are incompatible with (most of) the predictions, the question arises: are these discrepancies first hints for New Physics beyond the Standard Model? This volume concludes with a description of future facilities or important upgrades of existing facilities which improve their luminosity by orders of magnitude. The best is yet to come!

United States

Franz Gross

Germany

Eberhard Klempt

Stanley Brodsky

Andrzej Buras

Volker Burkert

Gudrun Heinrich

Karl Jakobs

Curtis Meyer

Kostas Orginos

Michael Strickland

Johanna Stachel

Giulia Zanderighi

Nora Brambilla

Peter Braun-Munzinger

Daniel Britzger

Simon Capstick

Tom Cohen

Volker Crede

Martha Constantinou

United Kingdom

Christine Davies

Luigi Debbio

Achim Denig

Carleton DeTar

Alexandre Deur

Russia

Latvia

Yuri Dokshitzer

Hans Dosch

Jozef Dudek

Monica Dunford

Evgeny Epelbaum

Spain

Miguel Escobedo

Harald Fritzsch

Japan

Kenji Fukushima

Italy

Paolo Gambino

Canada

Sweden

Dag Gillberg

Steven Gottlieb

CERN

Per Grafstrom

Switzerland

Massimiliano Grazzini

Boris Grube

JINR

Alexey Guskov

Toru Iijima

Xiangdong Ji

Frithjof Karsch

Stefan Kluth

John Kogut

Frank Krauss

Shunzo Kumano

Australia

Derek Leinweber

Heinrich Leutwyler

China

Hai-Bo Li

Yang Li

France

Bogdan Malaescu

Chiara Mariotti

Pieter Maris

Simone Marzani

Wally Melnitchouk

Johan Messchendorp

Harvey Meyer

Ryan Mitchell

Chandan Mondal

Frank Nerling

Sebastian Neubert

Marco Pappagallo

Saori Pastore

José Peláez

Andrew Puckett

Jianwei Qiu

Klaus Rabbertz

Alberto Ramos

Patrizia Rossi

Azerbaijan

Anar Rustamov

Andreas Schäfer

Stefan Scherer

Matthias Schindler

Steven Schramm

Mikhail Shifman

Edward Shuryak

Torbjörn Sjöstrand

George Sterman

Iain Stewart

Joachim Stroth

Eric Swanson

Costa Rica

Guy Téramond

Ulrike Thoma

Antonio Vairo

Danny Dyk

James Vary

Javier Virto

Marcel Vos

Christian Weiss

Markus Wobisch

Sau Wu

Christopher Young

Feng Yuan

Xingbo Zhao

Xiaorong Zhou

50 Years of quantum chromodynamics

The Standard Model does not constrain the form of the Yukawa matrices and thus the origin of fermion mass hierarchies and mixing pattern remains puzzling. On the other hand, there are intriguing relations between fermion masses and mixing angles which may point towards specific textures of Yukawa matrices. One of the classic hypothesis is the zero texture proposed by Fritzsch which is, however, excluded by present precision tests since it predicts a too large value of |V  cb | as well as a too small value of the ratio |V  ub /V  cb |. In this paper we discuss a minimal modification which still maintains the six zero entries as in the original Fritzsch ansatz. This modification consists in introducing an asymmetry between the 23 and 32 entries in the down-quark Yukawa matrix. We show that this flavour structure can naturally emerge in the context of models with inter-family SU(3) H  symmetry. We present a detailed analysis of this Fritzsch-like texture by testing its predictions and showing that it is perfectly compatible with the present precision data on quark masses and CKM mixing matrix.

Benedetta Belfatto

Zurab Berezhiani

Minimally modified Fritzsch texture for quark masses and CKM mixing

We calculate the quark flavor mixing matrix V based on the Hermitian quark mass matrices <math><msub><mrow><mi>M</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>u</mi></mrow></msub></math> and <math><msub><mrow><mi>M</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>d</mi></mrow></msub></math> with vanishing <math><mo>(</mo><mn>1</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>1</mn><mo>)</mo></math>, <math><mo>(</mo><mn>1</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>)</mo></math> and <math><mo>(</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>1</mn><mo>)</mo></math> entries. The popular leading-order prediction <math><mo>|</mo><msub><mrow><mi>V</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>u</mi><mi>b</mi></mrow></msub><mo>/</mo><msub><mrow><mi>V</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>c</mi><mi>b</mi></mrow></msub><mo>|</mo><mo>≃</mo><msqrt><mrow><msub><mrow><mi>m</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>u</mi></mrow></msub><mo>/</mo><msub><mrow><mi>m</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>c</mi></mrow></msub></mrow></msqrt></math> is significantly modified, and the result agrees with the current experimental value. We find that behind the strong mass hierarchy of up- or down-type quarks is the weak texture hierarchy of <math><msub><mrow><mi>M</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>u</mi></mrow></msub></math> or <math><msub><mrow><mi>M</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>d</mi></mrow></msub></math> characterized by an approximate seesaw-like relation among its <math><mo>(</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>)</mo></math>, <math><mo>(</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>)</mo></math> and <math><mo>(</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>)</mo></math> elements.

Zhi-zhong Xing

Di Zhang

Correlations between quark mass and flavor mixing hierarchies

The democracy of quark flavors is a well-motivated flavor symmetry, but it must be properly broken in order to explain the observed quark mass spectrum and flavor mixing pattern. We reconstruct the texture of flavor democracy breaking and evaluate its strength in a novel way, by assuming a parallelism between the Q=+2/3 and Q=−1/3 quark sectors and using a nontrivial parametrization of the flavor mixing matrix. Some phenomenological implications of such democratic quark mass matrices, including their variations in the hierarchy basis and their evolution from the electroweak scale to a super-high energy scale, are also discussed.

Zhi-Zhong Xing

The breaking of flavor democracy in the quark sectorSupported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11375207) and National Basic Research Program of China (2013CB834300)

We compute the time variation of the fundamental constants (such as the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass, the strong coupling constant, the fine-structure constant and Newton’s constant) within the context of the so-called running vacuum models (RVMs) of the cosmic evolution. Recently, compelling evidence has been provided that these models are able to fit the main cosmological data (SNIa+BAO+H(z)+LSS+BBN+CMB) significantly better than the concordance Λ CDM model. Specifically, the vacuum parameters of the RVM (i.e. those responsible for the dynamics of the vacuum energy) prove to be nonzero at a confidence level ≳3σ . Here we use such remarkable status of the RVMs to make definite predictions on the cosmic time variation of the fundamental constants. It turns out that the predicted variations are close to the present observational limits. Furthermore, we find that the time evolution of the dark matter particle masses should be crucially involved in the total mass variation of our Universe. A positive measurement of this kind of effects could be interpreted as strong support to the “micro–macro connection” (viz. the dynamical feedback between the evolution of the cosmological parameters and the time variation of the fundamental constants of the microscopic world), previously proposed by two of us (HF and JS).

Singapore

Joan SolÃ

Brazil

Rafael C. Nunes

Running vacuum in the Universe and the time variation of the fundamental constants of Nature

In quantum haplodynamics (QHD) the weak bosons, quarks, and leptons are bound states of fundamental constituents, denoted as haplons. The confinement scale of the associated gauge group <math id="M1"><mi>S</mi><mi>U</mi><mo>(</mo><mn>2</mn><msub><mrow><mo>)</mo></mrow><mrow><mi>h</mi></mrow></msub></math> is of the order of <math id="M2"><msub><mrow><mi>Λ</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>h</mi></mrow></msub><mo>≃</mo><mn>0.3</mn></math> TeV. One scalar state has zero haplon number and is the resonance observed at the LHC. In addition, there exist new bound states of haplons with no counterpart in the SM, having a mass of the order of 0.5 TeV up to a few TeV. In particular, a neutral scalar state with haplon number 4 is stable and can provide the dark matter in the universe. The QHD, QCD, and QED couplings can unify at the Planck scale. If this scale changes slowly with cosmic time, all of the fundamental couplings, the masses of the nucleons and of the DM particles, including the cosmological term (or vacuum energy density), will evolve with time. This could explain the dark energy of the universe.

Joan Solà

Quantum Haplodynamics, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy