Issues in determining alpha_s from hadronic tau decay and electroproduction data

TL;DR

This paper examines the challenges in accurately determining the strong coupling constant alpha_s from hadronic tau decay and electroproduction data, emphasizing the importance of accounting for duality violations and non-perturbative effects.

Contribution

It highlights the necessity of explicitly modeling duality-violating effects to improve the precision of alpha_s extractions from experimental data.

Findings

Duality-violating effects significantly impact alpha_s determinations.

Explicit modeling reduces theoretical uncertainties.

Further analysis confirms the importance of non-perturbative contributions.

Abstract

We discuss some key issues associated with duality-violating and non-perturbative OPE contributions to the theoretical representations of light quark current-current two-point functions and relevant to precision determinations of alpha_s from hadronic tau decay and electroproduction cross-section data. We demonstrate that analyses with an explicit representation of duality-violating effects are required to bring theoretical errors in such extractions under control, motivating the accompanying paper in these proceedings, which presents the results of such an analysis.