QCD sum rules are overviewed with an emphasize on the practical applications of this method to the physics of light and heavy hadrons.
talk given at Continuous Advances in QCD 2002/ ARKADYFEST (honoring the 60th birthday of Arkady Vainshtein), Minneapolis, Minnesota, 17-23 May 2002.
TTP02-23
arXiv:hep-ph/0209166v1 15 Sep 2002
QCD SUM RULES - A WORKING TOOL FOR HADRONIC PHYSICS
ALEXANDER KHODJAMIRIAN
∗)
Institut f¨ ur Theoretische Teilchenphysik, Universit¨ at Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe, Germany
1. Introduction Imagine a big birthday cake for Arkady Vainshtein, each candle on that cake corresponding to one of his outstanding contributions to the modern particle theory. I think, a very bright and illuminating candle should then mark QCD sum rules. The renown papers introducing QCD sum rules [ 1] have been published by Shifman, Vainshtein and Zakharov in 1979. The method, known also under the nickname of SVZ or ITEP sum rules, very soon became quite popular in the particle theory community, especially in Russia. Not only experienced theorists, but also many students of that time contributed to the development of this field with important results. It was indeed a lot of fun to start with an explicit QCD calculation in terms of quark-gluon Feynman diagrams and end up estimating dynamical characteristics of real hadrons. The flexibility and universality of the sum rule method allowed one to go from one interesting problem to another, describing, in the same framework, very different hadronic objects, from pions and nucleons to charmonium and B mesons. Nowadays, QCD sum rules are still being