Opportunities and Challenges for Theory in the N* program

The N*-program provides a path to understanding the essentially-nonperturbative fundamentals at the heart of the Standard Model: confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Relating this data to QCD’s basic degrees-of-freedom is a key challenge for theory. In tackling it, one steps immediately into the domain of relativistic quantum field theory where within the key phenomena can only be understood via nonperturbative methods. No one tool is yet fully equal to the challenge. Nonetheless, the last few years have seen significant progress in QCD-based theory, and the reaction models necessary to bridge the gap between that theory and experiment.