Application of the Large-N_c limit to a Chiral Lagrangian with Resonances

We argue that the large-Nc expansion of QCD can be used to treat a Lagrangian of resonances in a perturbative way. As an illustration of this we compute the L_10 coupling of the Chiral Lagrangian by integrating out resonance fields at one loop. Given a Lagrangian and a renormalization scheme, this is how in principle one can answer in a concrete and unambiguous manner questions such as at what scale resonance saturation takes place.

In the first part of the talk, I discussed results on the determination of the ratios of the light quark masses from large N_c chiral perturbation theory, to be described elsewhere. The following notes contain material from the second part of the talk, which concerns the implications of large N_c for resonance dominance estimates of the low energy coupling constants in chiral perturbation theory.

The construction of a resonance theory involving hadrons requires implementing the information from higher scales into the couplings of the effective Lagrangian. We consider the large-Nc chiral resonance theory incorporating scalars and pseudoscalars, and we find that, by imposing LO short-distance constraints on form factors of QCD currents constructed within this theory, the chiral low-energy constants satisfy resonance saturation at NLO in the 1/Nc expansion.

Chiral low-energy constants incorporate short-distance information from the dynamics involving heavier degrees of freedom not present in the chiral Lagrangian. We have studied the contribution of the lightest resonances to the chiral low-energy constants, up to O(p^6), within a systematic procedure guided by the large-Nc limit of QCD and also including short-distance asymptotic constraints.

Talk given at QCD 97, Montpellier, July 1997. In the first part of the talk, I presented a review of the results for the light quark masses obtained on the basis of chiral perturbation theory. As this material is described elsewhere, the following notes only concern the second part, which dealt with the behaviour of the effective theory in the large N_c limit.

The precision obtainable in phenomenological applications of Chiral Perturbation Theory is currently limited by our lack of knowledge on the low-energy constants (LECs). The assumption that the most important contributions to the LECs come from the dynamics of the low-lying resonances, often referred to as the resonance saturation hypothesis, has stimulated the use of large-Nc resonance lagrangians in order to obtain explicit values for the LECs. We study the validity of the ...

I discuss the recent attempts to build an effective chiral Lagrangian incorporating massive resonance states. A useful approximation scheme to organize the resonance Lagrangian is provided by the large-Nc limit of QCD. Integrating out the resonance fields, one recovers the usual chiral perturbation theory Lagrangian with explicit values for the low-energy constants, parameterized in terms of resonance masses and couplings. The resonance chiral theory generates Green functions...

A proper estimation of the chiral low-energy constants of Chiral Perturbation Theory is a very important task. To this end resonance chiral Lagrangians have been used fruitfully. We have studied the determination of chiral couplings at next-to-leading (NLO) order in the 1/N(C) expansion, keeping full control of the renormalization scale dependence. We find that, by imposing short-distance constraints coming from QCD, resonance saturation at NLO in 1/N(C) is satisfied. In othe...

The basic ideas and methods of chiral perturbation theory are briefly reviewed. I discuss the recent attempts to build an effective Lagrangian in the resonance region and summarize the known large-N_C constraints on the low-energy chiral couplings.

Although there are phenomenological indications that the low-energy constants in the chiral lagrangian may be understood in terms of a finite number of hadronic resonances, it remains unclear how this follows from QCD. One of the arguments usually given is that low-energy constants are associated with chiral symmetry breaking, while QCD perturbation theory suggests that at high energy chiral symmetry is unbroken, so that only low-lying resonances contribute to the low-energy ...