Large N_c Limit of Spin-Flavor Breaking in Excited Baryon Levels

Abstract

Spin-flavor symmetry breaking in the levels of excited Baryons are studied to leading order in the 1/$N_c$ expansion. This breaking occurs at zeroth order. For non-strange Baryons with a single quark excited, it is shown that to first order of perturbation theory the breaking is given by one 1-body operator (spin-orbit), and three 2-body operators, all involving the orbital angular momentum of the excited quark. Higher-body operators can be reduced to that set of operators. As illustration, p-wave Baryons are briefly discussed.

Comments: 16 pages, one table, Latex file; title changed, some omitted operators have been included and corrections to the results have been made