Abstract
The quadratic Casimir operator of the special unitary group is used to construct projection operators, which can decompose any of its reducible finite-dimensional representation spaces contained in the tensor product of two and three adjoint spaces into irreducible components. Although the method is general enough, it is specialized to the spin-flavor symmetry group, which emerges in the baryon sector of QCD in the large- limit, where and are the numbers of light quark flavors and color charges, respectively. The approach leads to the construction of spin and flavor projection operators that can be implemented in the analysis of the operator expansion. The use of projection operators allows one to successfully project out the desired components of a given operator and subtract off those that are not needed. Some explicit examples in and are detailed.
- Received 26 June 2020
- Accepted 31 July 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.036010
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society