Compelling evidence of renormalons in QCD from high order perturbative expansions

TL;DR

This paper computes high-order perturbative coefficients for the static self-energy in SU(3) gauge theory, providing strong numerical evidence for the existence of renormalons in QCD.

Contribution

It presents the first high-order (up to order 0) perturbative calculation confirming renormalon predictions in QCD using lattice regularization and stochastic perturbation theory.

Findings

High-order coefficients exhibit factorial growth consistent with renormalon predictions.

Numerical results match the operator product expansion-based conjecture.

Provides compelling evidence for renormalons in four-dimensional SU(3) gauge theory.

Abstract

We compute the static self-energy of SU(3) gauge theory in four spacetime dimensions to order \alpha^{20} in the strong coupling constant. We employ lattice regularization to enable a numerical simulation within the framework of stochastic perturbation theory. We find perfect agreement with the factorial growth of high order coefficients predicted by the conjectured renormalon picture based on the operator product expansion.