Large-N limit of the gradient flow in the 2D O(N) nonlinear sigma model

The gradient flow equation in the 2D O(N) nonlinear sigma model with lattice regularization is solved in the leading order of the 1/N expansion. By using this solution, we analytically compute the thermal expectation value of a lattice energy-momentum tensor defined through the gradient flow. The expectation value reproduces thermodynamic quantities obtained by the standard large-N method. This analysis confirms that the above lattice energy-momentum tensor restores the correct normalization automatically in the continuum limit, in a system with a nonperturbative mass gap.