Abstracto
- The complex nonperturbative color-confining dynamics of QCD is well captured in a semiclassical effective theory based on superconformal quantum mechanics and its extension to the light-front. I describe here how this new approach to hadron physics incorporates confinement, the appearance of nearly massless pseudoscalar particles, and Regge spectroscopy consistent with experiment. It also gives remarkable connections between the meson and baryon spectrum across the light and heavy-light hadron spectrum. I also briefly discuss how higher spin states are consistently described in this framework by the holographic embedding of the superconformal theory in a higher dimensional semiclassical gravity theory.