For this after dinner talk I intersperse images of real lattices with a discussion of the motivations for lattice gauge theory and some current unresolved issues.

Excitons are of fundamental interest and of importance foropto-electronic applications of bulk and nano-structured semiconductors.This paper discusses the utilization of ultrafast terahertz (THz) pulsesfor the study of characteristic low-energy excitations of photoexcitedquasi 2D electron-hole (e-h) gases. Optical-pump THz-probe spectroscopyat 250-kHz repetition rate is employed to detect characteristic THzsignatures of excitons and unbound e-h pairs in GaAs quantum wells.Exciton and free-carrier densities are extracted from the data using atwo-component model. We report the detailed THz response and pairdensities for different photoexcitation energies resonant to heavy-holeexcitons, light-hole excitons, or the continuum of unbound pairs. Suchexperiments can provide quantitative insights into wavelength, time, andtemperature dependence of the low-energy response and composition ofoptically excited e-h gases in low-dimensionalsemiconductors.

In this talk, I briefly review several models of the heavy quarkonium production at collider energies, and discuss the status of QCD factorization for these production models.