Leading Large N Modification of QCD_2 on a Cylinder by Dynamical Fermions

Abstract

We consider 2-dimensional QCD on a cylinder, where space is a circle. We find the ground state of the system in case of massless quarks in a $1/N$ expansion. We find that coupling to fermions nontrivially modifies the large $N$ saddle point of the gauge theory due to the phenomenon of `decompactification' of eigenvalues of the gauge field. We calculate the vacuum energy and the vacuum expectation value of the Wilson loop operator both of which show a nontrivial dependence on the number of quarks flavours at the leading order in $1/N$.