Mesons at large Nc from lattice QCD

Understand

We calculate the pion and rho meson masses in quenched SU(N) gauge theories for N = 2, 3, 4 and 6.

• Extrapolating these results to the chiral and large-N limits, we find m_rho = (1.670 +/- 0.024) sqrt(sigma) = (741 +/- 11) MeV for the rho meson mass at a fixed lattice spacing a \approx 0.2093 sqrt(sigma) \approx 0.093 fm where we use the (arbitrary) value (444 MeV)^2 for the string tension.
• We estimate a continuum limit large-N value, m_rho = 1.77 +/- 0.05 sqrt(sigma).
• We find 1/N^2 corrections to be small and we compare our results to predictions from AdS/QCD.