Nucleon-antinucleon annihilation at largeNc

Abstract

Nucleon-antinucleon annihilation in the large $N_c$ limit of QCD in the Witten regime of fixed velocity is considered with a focus on the spin and isospin dependence of the annihilation cross-section. In general, time-reversal and isospin invariance restricts the annihilation cross-section to depend on 6 independent energy-dependent terms. At large $N_c$, a spin-flavor symmetry emerges in the theory that acts to further restrict the dependence of the annihilation cross-section to three of these terms; the other terms amount to $1/N_c$ corrections. Assuming dominance of the leading order terms, several identities are derived that relate annihilation in different spin-isospin channels. A key prediction is that for unpolarized nucleons in Witten kinematics, the proton-antiproton annihilation cross-section should be equal to the proton-antineutron annihilation cross-section up to corrections of relative order $1/N_c$. Unpolarized nucleon-antinucleon annihilation data appears to be consistent with this expectation.