STRONG COUPLING FROM TAU LEPTON DECAYS

Abstract

A determination of the strong coupling αs at rather low energies is possible through the analysis of hadronic decays of the τ lepton. In turn, the low energy necessitates sufficient control over perturbative QCD corrections, the nonperturbative condensate contributions in the framework of the operator product expansion (OPE), as well as corrections going beyond the OPE, the duality violations (DVs). Perturbative QCD uncertainties arise from open questions regarding the renormalization group resummation of the series. The fit quantities are moment integrals of the τ spectral function data in a certain energy window and care should be taken to have good perturbative behavior of those moments as well as control over higher-dimensional operator corrections. Furthermore, all parameters occurring in the theoretical description should be extracted from fits to the data in a self-consistent manner.