Light-front QCD with Wilson fermions on a transverse lattice

In the light-front (LF) formulation of field theory, it is possible to write down a chirally invariant mass term. It thus appears as if one could solve the species doubling problem on a light-front quantized transverse lattice in a chirally invariant way. However, upon introducing link fields and after perturbative renormalization, one finds exactly the terms in the LF Hamiltonian as if one had started from the standard Wilson action in the first place. The only difference is the disappearance of the quark helicity flip terms for modified Wilson fermions for m-->0 in the canonical Hamiltonian - a result which is likely to change after non-perturbative renormalization. As an application of the Wilson formulation for fermions on a I lattice, we calculate spectrum, distribution functions and distribution amplitudes for mesons below 2 GeV in a truncated Fock space. [S0556-2821(99)04515-4].