Lattice Study of Planar Equivalence: The Quark Condensate

Abstract

We study quenched SU(N) gauge theories with fermions in the two-index symmetric, antisymmetric and the adjoint representations. Our main motivation is to check whether at large number of colours those theories become non-perturbatively equivalent. We prove the equivalence assuming that the charge-conjugation symmetry is not broken in pure Yang-Mills theory. We then carry out a quenched lattice simulation of the quark condensate in the symmetric, antisymmetric and the adjoint representations for SU(2), SU(3), SU(4), SU(6) and SU(8). We show that the data support the equivalence and discuss the size of subleading corrections.