Quenched mesonic spectrum at large N

Abstract

We compute the masses of the $π$ and of the $ρ$ mesons in the quenched approximation on a lattice with fixed lattice spacing $a \simeq 0.145 \ \mathrm{fm}$ for SU($N$) gauge theory with $N = 2,3,4,6$. We find that a simple linear expression in $1/N^2$ correctly captures the features of the lowest-lying meson states at those values of $N$. This enables us to extrapolate to $N = \infty$ the behaviour of $m_π$ as a function of the quark mass and of $m_ρ$ as a function of $m_π$. Our results for the latter agree within 5% with recent predictions obtained in the AdS/CFT framework.

Reference added; typos corrected; version to appear on JHEP