Phenomenological Analysis of a DimensionTwo Operator in QCD and its Impact on alpha_s}(M.pdfVIP

UCT-TP-221/94 November 1994 Phenomenological analysis of a dimension-two 4 operator in QCD and its impact on α (M ) 9 s τ 9 1 v o 1 N C. A. Dominguez 8 1 Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa 1 v 1 3 3 1 1 4 9 / Abstract h p - p Fits to the ARGUS data on hadronic decays of the tau-lepton, which determine the e vector and axial-vector spectral functions, are used in order to determine the size h : of a dimension d = 2 term in the Operator Product Expansion. Constraints from v i the first Weinberg sum rule (in the chiral limit) are enforced in order to reduce the X uncertainty of this determination. Results for the d = 2 operator are consistent r a with a quadratic dependence on ΛQCD . The impact of this term on the extraction of α (M ) is assessed. s τ 1John Simon Guggenheim Fellow 1994-1995 A technique based on analyticity and the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) of current correlators was proposed some time ago [1] to extract the strong coupling constant from data on e+e− annihilation, and on the total hadronic width of the tau-lepton. Recent re- sults [2] suggest this method to be unrivaled in precision. However, this high precision has been questioned recently [3] on the grounds that it relies on the assumption that no op- erators