BARYON CHIRAL PERTURBATION THEORY IN THE 1/Nc EXPANSION

The chiral Lagrangian for baryons is formulated in an expansion in 1/N_c. The chiral Lagrangian implements the contracted spin-flavor symmetry of large-N_c baryons as well as nonet symmetry of the leading planar diagrams. Large-N_c consistency conditions ensure that chiral loop corrections are suppressed in 1/N_c through exact cancellation of chiral loop graphs to fixed orders in 1/N_c. Application of 1/N_c baryon chiral perturbation theory to the flavor-27 baryon mass splittings and the baryon axial vector currents are considered as examples.