Baryons with many colors and flavors

May, 1994
23 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 51 (1995) 2322-2331
e-Print:
Report number:
  • LBL-35539,
  • NSF-ITP-94-42

Citations per year

199420022010201820240246810
Abstract:
Using recently-developed diagrammatic techniques, I derive some general results concerning baryons in the 1/N1/N expansion, where NN is the number of QCD colors. I show that the spin-flavor relations which hold for baryons in the large-NN limit, as well as the form of the corrections to these relations at higher orders in 1/N1/N, hold even if NF/N1N_F / N \sim 1, where NFN_F is the number of light quark flavors. I also show that the amplitude for a baryon to emit nn mesons is O(1/N n/21)O(1 / N~{n / 2 - 1}), and that meson loops attached to baryon lines are unsupressed in the large-NN limit, independent of NFN_F. For NF>2N_F > 2, there are ambiguities in the extrapolation away from N=3N = 3 because the baryon flavor multiplets for a given spin grow with NN. I argue that the 1/N1/N expansion is valid for baryons with spin O(1)O(1) and {\it arbitrary} flavor quantum numbers, including e.g. baryons with isospin and/or strangeness O(N)O(N). This allows the formulation of a large-NN expansion in which it is not necessary to identify the physical baryons with particular large-NN states. SU(NF)SU(N_F) symmetry can be made manifest to all orders in 1/N1/N, yet group theory factors must be evaluated explicitly only for NF=N=3N_F = N = 3. To illustrate this expansion, I consider the non-singlet axial currents, baryon mass splittings, and matrix elements of \mybar ss and \mybar s \gam_\mu \gam_5 s in the nucleon.
  • baryon: color
  • baryon: flavor
  • spin: flavor
  • flavor: spin
  • symmetry: SU(N)
  • current: axial
  • baryon: mass difference
  • mass difference: baryon
  • meson baryon: interaction
  • interaction: meson baryon