Large Nc scaling of meson masses and decay constants

Abstract

We perform an ab initio calculation of the Nc scaling of the low-energy couplings of the chiral Lagrangian of low-energy strong interactions, extracted from the mass dependence of meson masses and decay constants. We compute these observables on the lattice with four degenerate fermions, Nf= 4 , and varying number of colours, Nc= 3 –6, at a lattice spacing of a≃ 0.075 fm. We find good agreement with the expected Nc scaling and measure the coefficients of the leading and subleading terms in the large Nc expansion. From the subleading Nc corrections, we can also infer the Nf dependence, that we use to extract the value of the low-energy couplings for different values of Nf. We find agreement with previous determinations at Nc= 3 and Nf= 2 , 3 and also, our results support a strong paramagnetic suppression of the chiral condensate in moving from Nf= 2 to Nf= 3