Renormalization of the baryon axial vector current in large-N_c chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

The baryon axial vector current is computed at one-loop order in heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory in the large-N_c limit, where N_c is the number of colors. Loop graphs with octet and decuplet intermediate states cancel to various orders in N_c as a consequence of the large-N_c spin-flavor symmetry of QCD baryons. These cancellations are explicitly shown for the general case of N_f flavors of light quarks. In particular, a new generic cancellation is identified in the renormalization of the baryon axial vector current at one-loop order. A comparison with conventional heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory is performed at the physical values N_c=3, N_f=3.