QCD vacuum condensates from tau-lepton decay data

Abstract

The QCD vacuum condensates in the Operator Product Expansion are extracted from the final ALEPH data on vector and axial-vector spectral functions from $τ$-decay. Weighted Finite Energy Sum Rules are employed in the framework of both Fixed Order and Contour Improved Perturbation Theory. An overall consistent picture satisfying chirality constraints can be achieved only for values of the QCD scale below some critical value $Λ\simeq350 {MeV}$. For larger values of $Λ$, perturbation theory overwhelms the power corrections. A strong correlation is then found between $Λ$ and the resulting values of the condensates. Reasonable accuracy is obtained up to dimension $d=8$, beyond which no meaningful extraction is possible.