Matching long and short distances in large-N<inf>c</inf> QCD

It is shown, with the example of the experimentally known Adler function, that there is no matching in the intermediate region between the two asymptotic regimes described by perturbative QCD (for the very short-distances) and by chiral perturbation theory (for the very long-distances). We then propose to consider an approximation of large-Nc QCD which consists in restricting the hadronic spectrum in the channels with Jp quantum numbers 0-, 1-, 0+ and 1+ to the lightest state and to treat the rest of the narrow states as a perturbative QCD continuum; the onset of this continuum being fixed by consistency constraints from the operator product expansion. We show how to construct the low-energy effective Lagrangian which describes this approximation. The number of free parameters in the resulting effective Lagrangian can be reduced, in the chiral limit where the light quark masses are set to zero, to just one mass scale and one dimensionless constant to all orders in chiral perturbation theory. A comparison of the corresponding predictions, to (p4) in the chiral expansion, with the phenomenologically known couplings is also made.