Nuclear and Hadronic Physics at large Nc

Abstract

This talk briefly surveys some of the advances in large Nc QCD in nuclear and hadronic physics during the past decade or so. It highlights recent results including an analytic result for the total nucleon-nucleon cross section in nucleon-nucleon scattering in the extreme large Nc limit (logNc 1)); it is given by s total = 2p log 2 (Nc) m 2 for p s much larger than the QCD scale. The talk also stresses a demonstration that given certain technical assumptions, it can be shown that QCD must have a Hagedorn spectrum (i.e., a spectrum where the number of hadrons grows exponentially with hadron mass) . Another theme in the talk is the phenomenology of a variant of the large Nc limit based on quarks in the two-index antisymmetric representation. This variant of large Nc QCD is qualitatively different from the conventional one in which quarks are in the fundamental representation and corresponds to a distinct large Nc limit with a distinct 1=Nc expansion. The description of nuclear forces and nuclear matter in both variants of the largeNc limit are discussed.