The ADS/QCD correspondence and exclusive processes

The AdS/CFT correspondence between theories in AdS space and conformal field theories in physical space-time provides an analytic, semi-classical, color-confining model for strongly-coupled QCD. The soft-wall AdS/QCD model, modified by a positive-sign dilaton metric, leads to a remarkable one-parameter description of nonperturbative hadron dynamics at zero quark mass, including a zero-mass pion and meson and baryon Regge spectra of linear trajectories with the same slope in orbital angular momentum L and radial quantum number n. One also predicts the form of the non-perturbative effective coupling alpha AdS/s (Q) and its Beta-function which agrees with the effective coupling alphag1 extracted from the Bjorken sum rule. Light-front holography, which connects the fifth-dimensional coordinate of AdS space z to an invariant impact separation variable zeta, allows one to compute the analytic form of the frame-independent light-front wave functions, the fundamental entities which encode hadron properties as well as decay constants, form factors, deeply-virtual Compton scattering, exclusive heavy hadron decays, and other exclusive scattering amplitudes. One thus obtains a relativistic description of hadrons in QCD at the amplitude level with dimensional counting for exclusive reactions at high momentum transfer. As specific examples, we discuss the behavior of the pion and nucleon form factors in the space-like and time-like regions. We also review the phenomenology of exclusive processes including some anomalous empirical results.