The String Calculation of Wilson Loops in Two-Dimensional Yang-Mills Theory

We demonstrate that the large-N expansion of Wilson loop expectation values in SO(N) and Sp(N) Yang-Mills theory on orientable and nonorientable surfaces has a natural description as a weighted sum over covers of the given surface. The sum takes the form of the perturbative expansion of an open string theory. The derivation makes contact with the classification of branched covers by Gabai and Kazez. Comparison with the analogous results for the chiral sectors of QCD_2 is instructive for both cases.