Singularities of massless planar diagrams, large-N_c mesons in 3+1 dimensions, and the 't Hooft model

Abstract

We study the singular Landau surfaces of planar diagrams contributing to scattering of a massless quark and antiquark in 3+1 dimensions. In particular, we look at singularities which remain after integration with respect to the various angular degrees of freedom. We derive a general relation between these singularities and the singularities of quark- antiquark scattering in 1+1 dimensions. We then classify all Landau surfaces of the 1+1 dimensional system. Combining these results, we deduce that the singular surfaces of the angle- integrated 3+1 dimensional amplitude must satisfy at least one of three conditions, which we call the planar light-cone conditions. We discuss the extension of our results to non-perturbative processes by means of the non-perturbative operator product expansion. Our findings offer new insights into the connection between the 't Hooft model and large-N_c mesons in 3+1 dimensions and may prove useful in studies of confinement in relativistic meson systems.