Nucleon-nucleon scattering matrix and its Nc scaling

This paper focuses on the scaling of the S matrix for elastic nucleon-nucleon scattering at large N-c. It is argued that the logarithm of a typical S matrix element is proportional to N-c in the regime where the large N-c limit is taken with momentum of the incident nucleons proportional N-c. The suggested scaling was previously derived within the framework of potential scattering models for purely elastic scattering in which the parameters scale the same way as in large N-c QCD. A variety of heuristic arguments strongly suggest that the same scaling holds in the realistic case where both elastic and inelastic scattering are possible.