My current research work covers several aspects of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions that is used to describe the properties of hadrons in terms of quarks and gluons.

I am currently using a novel method, called renormalization group procedure for effective particles (RGPEP), to define the QCD bound-state eigenvalue equation by means of the effective Hamiltonian that is systematically derived starting from the local Lagrangian density of the theory and using first principles. The eigenvalues of such effective Hamiltonian are the squared masses and its eigenstates are described in terms of wave functions. I am studying properties of the binding force that are responsible for the confinement of quarks (and gluons) and the formation of bound states and hadron resonances. In our latest work, my collaborators and I have discovered features of the quark and gluon dynamics that are intimately related to the confinement problem and to the dynamical generation of mass. It was also recently checked that the RGPEP describes properly the the QCD feature of asymptotic freedom in terms of a family of the renormalized effective Hamiltonians.

The RGPEP stems from the similarity renormalization group procedure of Glazek and Wilson and it is formulated in the Dirac's front form (or light front) of relativistic dynamics. The solutions to the eigenvalue equation yield light-front wave functions, which explain the partonic structure of hadrons (read more...).

I am also involved in the study of hadron properties in other approaches to QCD in the continuum. I have been working in collaboration with the Austrian FWF-P25121 project Covariant Models of Hadrons at the University of Graz. In this project, we consider the Dyson-Schwinger-Bethe-Salpeter equations (DSBSE). We study the consequences of three-gluon vertex dressing for meson masses, including their dependence on the quark masses. We also investigate the possibility of improving existing phenomenological models within the rainbow-ladder truncation.