Radiative corrections to e+e- --> f+f-

Abstract

The past ten years of physics with e+e- colliding experiments at LEP and SLAC have shown the success of these experiments on not only impressively proving the theoretical predictions of the Standard Model (SM), but also to help provide stringent bounds on physics beyond the SM. With this experience in mind, there appear two equally fascinating opportunities for studying fermion-pair production processes at a future Linear Collider (LC). On the one hand, performing high precision measurements to the SM, for example, when running with high luminosity at the Z boson resonance, could be a quick and feasible enterprise in order to pin down the symmetry breaking mechanism of the electroweak sector through indirectly determining the masses of a light SM or MSSM Higgs boson or supersymmetric particles via virtual corrections. On the other hand, looking for such particles in direct production or other `New Physics' effects at energies between, for example, roughly 500 and 800 GeV will naturally be the main motivation to pursue the challenging endeavor of building and utilizing such a unique facility. These two scenarios for the LC shall be sketched here, with particular emphasis on the semi-analytical program ZFITTER for fermion-pair production in comparison with numerical programs like TOPAZ0, KK2f, and others.