Large Nc QCD 2004: proceedings of the workshop, Trento, Italy, 5-11, 2004

The large Nc limit plays a fundamental role in the study of non-abelian gauge theories such as quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

Since its discovery in 1974 by 't Hooft, the 1/Nc expansion has provided crucial insights into the non-perturbative aspects of gauge theories.

The expansion implemented at the effective theory level is one of the fundamental tools currently in use in hadronic physics; there are important effects and relations that follow from the 1/Nc expansion, which held remarkably well in the real world with Nc= 3.

The 1/Ncexpansion also plays a central role in the recently discovered connections between non-Abelian gauge and string theories, promising new ways to analyze the non-perturbative domain of gauge theories.This volume contains contributions from leading theorists and covers the recent developments in the 1/Nc expansion in QCD.

The topics addressed include confinement, AdS/CFT correspondence and the string-QCD connection, topology in large Nc, lattice QCD, and a variety of applications to mesons and baryons.Contents: Confinement at Large Nc (G 't Hooft)The First Thirty Years of Large N Gauge Theory (Yu Makeenko)Planar Equivalence: From Type 0 Strings to QCD (A Armoni, M Shifman & G Veneziano)Large N QCD on the Lattice: A Review of Recent Results in the Fermionic Sector (R Narayanan & H Neuberger)Baryons (A V Manohar)Baryonic States in QCD from Gauge/String Duality at Large Nc (G F De Teramond & S J Brodsky)and other papersReadership: Graduate students and researchers in theoretical, particle and nuclear physics.