1/Ncexpansion for excited baryons

We derive consistency conditions which constrain the possible form of the strong couplings of the excited baryons to the pions. The consistency conditions follow from requiring the pion-excited baryon scattering amplitudes to satisfy the large-$N_c$ Witten counting rules and are analogous to consistency conditions used by Dashen, Jenkins, and Manohar and others for $s$-wave baryons. The consistency conditions are explicitly solved, giving the most general allowed form of the strong vertices for excited baryons in the large-$N_c$ limit. We show that the solutions to the large-$N_c$ consistency conditions coincide with the predictions of the nonrelativistic quark model for these states, extending the results previously obtained for the $s$-wave baryons. The ${1/N}_c$ corrections to these predictions are studied in the quark model with arbitrary number of colors $N_c.$