1997/07/31 by Stanley J. Brodsky, Patrick Huet · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s0370-2693(97)01209-4
published as Phys.Lett.B417:145-153,1998 · Contract number added, LaTex, 16 pages
arxiv created 1997/08/11 · openalex publication_date 1998/01/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate properties of the color space of SU(Nc) gauge theories in the limit of small number of colors (Nc→0) and large number of flavors. More generally, we introduce a rescaling of αs and nf which assigns a finite limit to colored quantities as Nc→0, which reproduces their known large-Nc limit, and which expresses them as an analytic function of Nc2 for arbitrary value of Nc. The vanishing-Nc limit has an Abelian character and is also the small-Nc limit of [U(1)]Nc−1. This limit does not have an obvious quantum field theory interpretation; however, it provides practical consistency checks on QCD perturbative quantities by comparing them to their QED counterparts. Our analysis also describes the two-dimensional topological structure involved in the interpretation of the small Nc-limit in color space.