The spectrum of two-dimensional adjoint QCD is surprisingly insensitive to the number of colors Nc of its gauge group. It is argued that the cancellation of finite Nc terms is rather natural and ultimately a consequence of the singularity structure of the theory. In short, there are no finite Nc terms, hence effectively there cannot be any finite Nc singular terms, since the former are necessary to guarantee well-behaved principal value integrals. We evaluate and categorize the matrix elements of the theory’s light-cone Hamiltonian to show how terms emerging from finite Nc contributions to the anticommutator cancel against contributions from the purely finite Nc term of the Hamiltonian. The cancellation is not complete; finite terms survive and modify the spectrum, as is known from numerical work. Additionally we show that several parton-number changing finite Nc matrix elements vanish independently of finiteness requirements. In particular, there is only one trace-diagonal finite Nc correction. It seems therefore that considering matrix elements rather than individual contributions can provide substantial simplifications when computing the spectrum of a theory with a large symmetry group. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
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