Future directions in studying QCD aspects of Nuclear Physics Original Research Article

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) provides the framework for our understanding of the strong interaction, and is therefore at the basis of our understanding of nuclear physics. The difficulty encountered when applying QCD to the length scales appropriate for nucleons, however, is the fact that the perturbative techniques used to solve QCD at high energies cannot be used. Neverthless considerable progress is being made in this domain through a series of very precise experiments that were analysed in a QCD framework. In this way the quark-gluon structure of hadrons has been investigated successfully. In recent years these studies were extended in various directions. Striking results in the areas of hadron spectrospy and hadron form factors revived the interest in the corresponding experiments, while the (theoretical) introduction of the transverse spin distributions and the generalized parton distributions led to a whole set of newly proposed experiments. Initial results obtained in each of these areas of research are used to illustrate likely future directions of experiments aimed at unraveling the QCD structure of the nucleon.