Hello again from Valparaíso. Today's first speaker was Johan Bijnens with a review of recent results from chiral perturbation theory in the mesonic sector, including recent results for charged pion polarisabilities and for finite-volume corrections to lattice measurements. To allow others to perform their own calculations for their own specific needs (which might include technicolor-like theories, which will generally have different patterns of chiral symmetry breaking, but otherwise work just the same way), Bijnens & Co. have recently published CHIRON, a general two-loop mesonic χPT package. The leading logarithms have been determined to high orders, and it has been found that the speed of convergence depends both on the observable and on whether the leading-order or physical pion decay constant is used.
Next was Boris Grube, who presented some recent results from light-meson spectroscopy. The light mesons are generally expected to be some kind of superpositions of quark-model states, hybrids, glueballs, tetraquark and molecular states, as may be compatible with their quantum numbers in each case. The most complex sector is the 0++ sector of f0 mesons, in which the lightest glueball state should lie. While the γγ width of the f0(1500) appears to be compatible with zero, which would agree with the expectations for a glueball, whereas the f0(1710) has a photonic width more in agreement with being an s-sbar state, in J/ψ -> γ (ηη), which as a gluon-rich process should couple strongly to glueball resonances, little or no f0(1500) is seen, whereas a glueball nature for the f0(1710) would be supported by these results. New data to come from GlueX, and later from PANDA, should help to clarify things.
The next speaker was Paul Sorensen with a talk on the search for the critical point in the QCD phase diagram. The quark-gluon plasma at RHIC is not only a man-made system that is over 300 times hotter than the centre of the Sun, it is also the most perfect fluid known, as it close to saturates the viscosity bound η/s > 1/(4π). Studying it experimentally is quite difficult, however, since one must extrapolate back to a small initial fireball, or "little bang", from correlations between thousands of particle tracks in a detector, not entirely dissimilar from the situation in cosmology, where the properties of the hot big bang (and previous stages) are inferred from angular correlations in the cosmic microwave background. Beam energy scans find indications that the phase transition becomes first-order at higher densities, which would indicate the existence of a critical endpoint, but more statistics and more intermediate energies are needed.
After the coffee break, François-Xavier Girod spoke about Generalised Parton Distributions (GPDs) and deep exclusive processes. GPDs, which reduce to form factors and to parton distributions upon integrating out the unneeded variables in each case, correspond to a three-dimensional image of the nucleon performed in the longitudinal momentum fraction and the transverse impact parameter, and their moments are related to matrix elements of the energy-momentum tensor. Experimentally, they are probed using deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS); the 12 GeV upgrade at Jefferson Lab will increase the coverage in both Bjørken-x and Q2, and the planned electron-ion collider is expected to allow probing the sea and gluon GPDs as well.
After the lunch break, there were parallel sessions. I chaired the parallel session on lattice and other perturbative methods, with presentations of lattice results by Eigo Shintani and Tereza Mendes, as well as a number of AdS/QCD-related results by various others.
