Perturbative expansion of tau hadronic spectral function moments

Abstract

In the extraction of $\alpha_s$ from hadronic tau decay data several moments of the spectral functions have been employed. Furthermore, different renormalization group improvement (RGI) frameworks have been advocated, leading to conflicting values of $\alpha_s$. Recently, we performed a systematic study of the perturbative behavior of these moments in the context of the two main-stream RGI frameworks: Fixed Order Perturbation Theory (FOPT) and Contour Improved Perturbation Theory (CIPT). The yet unknown higher order coefficients of the perturbative series were modelled using the available knowledge of the renormalon singularities of the QCD Adler function. We were able to show that within these RGI frameworks some of the commonly employed moments should be avoided due to their poor perturbative behavior. Furthermore, under reasonable assumptions about the higher order behavior of the perturbative series FOPT provides the preferred RGI framework.