S-wave baryon nonleptonic decay amplitude in large-N_c chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

The s-wave decay amplitude in the nonleptonic decay of baryons is analyzed within heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory in the large-N_c limit at one-loop order, where N_c is the number of color charges. Loop graphs with octet and decuplet intermediate states are systematically incorporated into the analysis and the effects of the decuplet-octet mass difference are accounted for. There are large-N_c cancellations between different one-loop graphs as a consequence of the large-N_c spin-flavor symmetry of QCD baryons. The predictions of large-N_c baryon chiral perturbation theory are in very good agreement both with the expectations from the 1/N_c expansion and with the experimental data.