Relativistic quantum theory of composite systems

A relativistic quantum theory free from the difficulties of tachyons and ghosts is formulated to describe the scattering processes between composite systems of spinless quarks. To evade the complication brewed by introducing gluon fields or strings, valence quarks are effectively assumed to be in the relative motion of harmonic oscillation correlating with the motion of the composite system as a whole. A quark-antiquark system is represented by a bilocal field describing a sequence of mesons and every meson is identified with the composite system in a definite eigenstate of relative motion. The quantization is performed in the interaction picture, so that the microcausal condition is satisfied by local fields which result from the decomposition of bilocal fields. Imposing a weakened macrocausal condition on the whole motion of the extended system, a causal bilocal propagator is defined and a consistent time ordering among bilocal fields is defined. The invariant S-matrix is obtained and the graphical method for the calculation of its elements is developed in parallel with the conventional local field theory. For the (bilocal field)3 interaction any malignant divergence does not appear excepting those in the renormalizable local field theory. The theory provides one promising and comprehensive phenomenology of hadrons which is suitable especially to describe the hard structure of hadrons. (author)