I have recently been becoming interested in quantum chromodynamics and have been wondering what is the future of this field? what problems are currently being worked on? what areas are "hot" in this field?

At lower energies:

 

• Confinement (why quarks are confined in hadrons)
  
• Predicting the hadron spectrum using lattice gauge theory
  

 

At higher energies:

 

• Calculating NNLO corrections to e⁺e^- to 3 jets or pp to 2 jets + W
  

^so those are hot topics right now?

 

interesting..i'll look them up thanks

People are also interested in quark matter, which may be in the centre of neutron stars. Have a look at this short introduction

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QCD_matter

is most work theoretical or is there a significant amount of experimental work going on as well? what applications does this knowledge have? do we know yet?

I was told that most of the lattice field theory work on QCD is trying to explain experimental results form many years ago.

 

On the theoretical side twistor string theory and MHV (maximally helicity violating ) tree amplitudes in (super) QCD, has become a big thing.

Some lattice results even manage to come before the experimental ones:

http://www.aip.org/pnu/2005/split/731-1.html