| The fundamental theory used to describe strongly interacting systems is quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Until 1974 all predictions of QCD were restricted to the perturbative regime. Unfortunately, although perturbation theory is extremely successful in describing a wide range of high-energy phenomena, it fails dramatically to reproduce many of the essential low-energy features of the hadronic world, such as the spectrum of low-lying hadron states. A lattice technique proposed by Kenneth Wilson in 1974 became a standard tool for probing non perturbative aspects of QCD. Presently, lattice formulation provides the only known framework to study QCD non perturbatively. It allows us to answer important questions about hadron structure, hadron-hadron interactions, confinement, and so forth. The lattice QCD technique is also a convenient tool to obtain insight into fundamental aspects of QCD responsible for the observed features of the hadron structure. We hope to understand how quarks propagate in the physical vacuum, the mechanism that confines them into hadrons, and the mechanism producing chiral symmetry breaking.; Historically, there was a significant difficulty in placing chiral fermions on a space-time discretized lattice. Two promising methods were proposed recently for this purpose: the domain wall fermion formulation and the overlap formulation. These two largely equivalent methods have a chirally invariant limit at finite lattice spacing.; This study uses the domain wall fermion approach. The effective quark mass induced by the finite separation of the domain walls in the domain wall formulation of chiral fermions as the function of the size of the fifth dimension (Ls), the gauge coupling β and the physical volume V is studied. The induced quark mass is nearly independent of the physical volume, decays exponentially as a function of L s, and has a strong dependence on the size of quantum fluctuations controlled by β.; This thesis also describes calculations of such fundamental properties of the nucleon as the electromagnetic form factors, magnetic moments and the spin structure. A lattice determination of the form factors and magnetic moments provides a useful benchmark for the accuracy of the lattice delineation of the nucleon. The nucleon magnetic moments are calculated in an approach free from momentum extrapolation. The fraction of the nucleon spin carried by the quark angular momentum is also calculated in the quenched lattice QCD approximation. |
