Violations of local duality in the heavy quark sector

We examine the origin of possible failures of the quark-hadron local duality. In particular, we consider a correlator of two currents comprising heavy quark operators, and compare the evaluation by the Operator Product Expansion with the result obtained inserting an infinite set of hadronic states, in the N-c --> infinity limit. Whereas the smeared spectral functions agree with each other, their local behaviour is different. The difference manifests itself in the form of a term O(Lambda/epsilon) (epsilon being the residual energy) that is not present in the expansion in powers of Lambda/epsilon predicted by the OPE. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.