Occupation number formalism for arbitrary Nc baryons

Abstract

A general method is presented for computing matrix elements of quark operators on baryonic states with low strangeness and arbitrary number of colors Nc. These results are useful in applications of the large Nc expansion to baryons and exotics. As an application we compute the matrix elements of strangeness changing operators contributing to kaon couplings to ground state baryons and pentaquarks, in broken SU (3).