The Quark Condensate in Multi-Flavour QCD - Planar Equivalence Confronting Lattice Simulations

Abstract

Planar equivalence between the large $N$ limits of ${\cal N}=1$ Super Yang-Mills (SYM) theory and a variant of QCD with fermions in the antisymmetric representation is a powerful tool to obtain analytic non-perturbative results in QCD itself. In particular, it allows the quark condensate for $N=3$ QCD with quarks in the fundamental representation to be inferred from exact calculations of the gluino condensate in ${\cal N}=1$ SYM. In this paper, we review and refine our earlier predictions for the quark condensate in QCD with a general number $n_f$ of flavours and confront these with lattice results.