New Directions in Quantum

I review the light-cone Fock state represention and its associated light-cone fac-torization scheme as a method for encoding the avor, momentum, and helicity prop-erties of hadrons in the form of universal process-independent and frame-independent amplitudes. Discrete light-cone quantization (DLCQ) provides a matrix representa-tion of the QCD Hamiltonian and a nonperturbative method for computing the quark and gluon bound state wavefunctions. A number of applications of the light-cone for-malism are discussed, including an exact light-cone Fock state representation of semi-leptonic B decay amplitudes. Hard exclusive and diractive reactions are shown to be sensitive to hadron distribution amplitudes, the valence Fock state hadronic wavefuc-tions at small impact separation. Semi-exclusive reactions are shown to provide new avor-dependent probes of distribution amplituds and new types of deep inelastic cur-rents. \Self-resolving " diractive processes and Coulomb dissociation are discussed as a direct measure of the light-cone wavefunctions of hadrons. Alternatively, one can use Coulomb dissociation to resolve nuclei in terms of their nucleonic and mesonic degrees of freedom. I also discuss several theoretical tools which eliminate theoretical ambiguities in perturbative QCD predictions. For example, commensurate scale re-lations are perturbative QCD predictions based on conformal symmetry which relate observable to observable at xed relative scale; such relations have no renormaliza-tion scale or scheme ambiguity. I also discuss the utility of the V coupling, dened from the QCD heavy quark potential, as a useful physical expansion parameter for perturbative QCD and grand unication. New results on the analytic fermion masses dependence of the V coupling at two-loop order are presented. Invited talk presented a