On Spectral Functions Sum Rules

The aim of the book is to give an introduction to the method of QCD Spectral Sum Rules and to review its developments. After some general introductory remarks, Chiral Symmetry, the Historical Developments of the Sum Rules and the necessary materials for perturbative QCD including the MS regularization and renormalization schemes are discussed. The book also gives a critical review and some improvements of the wide uses of the QSSR in Hadron Physics and QSSR beyond the Standard Hadron Phenomenology. The author has participated actively in this field since 1978 just before the expanding success of the SVZ QSSR.

The author develops a novel analysis method for QCD sum rules (QCDSR) by applying the maximum entropy method (MEM) to arrive at an analysis with less artificial assumptions than previously held. This is a first-time accomplishment in the field. In this thesis, a reformed MEM for QCDSR is formalized and is applied to the sum rules of several channels: the light-quark meson in the vector channel, the light-quark baryon channel with spin and isospin 1/2, and several quarkonium channels at both zero and finite temperatures. This novel technique of combining QCDSR with MEM is applied to the study of quarkonium in hot matter, which is an important probe of the quark-gluon plasma currently being created in heavy-ion collision experiments at RHIC and LHC.