Light-front QCD. III. Coupling constant renormalization

In this third part in a series of papers on light-front QCD, we continue the study of regularization and renormalization in old-fashioned perturbative light-front formalism. We calculate lowest order radiative corrections to the quark-gluon coupling constant in light-front QCD. An attempt is made to understand the origin of antiscreening in a formulation of QCD with only physical degrees of freedom in terms of contributions from distinct Fock space sectors. The relevance of our results to bound state calculations in QCD with a truncated Fock space are discussed.