Quenched mesonic spectrum at large N

We compute the masses of the p and of the. mesons in the quenched approximation on a lattice with fixed lattice spacing a similar or equal to 0.145 fm for SU(N) gauge theory with N = 2, 3, 4, 6. We find that a simple linear expression in 1/N-2 correctly captures the features of the lowest-lying meson states at those values of N. This enables us to extrapolate to N = 8 the behaviour of m(pi) as a function of the quark mass and of m(rho) as a function of m(pi). Our results for the latter agree within 5% with recent predictions obtained in the AdS/CFT framework.