Chiral symmetry breaking at large N_c

Abstract

We present numerical evidence for the hypothesis that, in the planar limit, four dimensional Euclidean Yang-Mills theory on a finite symmetrical four-torus breaks chiral symmetry spontaneously when the length of the sides l is larger than a critical value l_c with a bilinear condensate whose value is independent of l. Therefore spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs at finite volume and infinite N_c reduction holds for the chiral condensate.

Comments: 43 pages, 16 figures, 1 table, more typos corrected