Disentangling perturbative and power corrections in precision tau decay analysis

Abstract

Hadronic tau decay precision data are analyzed with account of both perturbative and power corrections of high orders within QCD. It is found that contributions of high order power corrections are essential for extracting a numerical value for the strange quark mass from the data on Cabibbo suppressed tau decays. We show that with inclusion of new five-loop perturbative corrections in the analysis the convergence of perturbation theory remains acceptable only for few low order moments. We obtain m_s(M_\tau) =130\pm 27 MeV in agreement with previous estimates.