Naive nonabelianization and resummation of fermion bubble chains

Abstract

We propose to extend the Brodsky-Lepage-Mackenzie scale-fixing prescription by resumming exactly any number of one-loop vacuum polarization insertions into one-loop diagrams. In this way, one makes maximal use of the information contained in one-loop perturbative corrections combined with the one-loop running of the effective coupling. The scale ambiguity at leading order is converted into an intrinsic uncertainty of perturbative approximations induced by IR renormalons. Practical implementation of this resummation requires only knowledge of one-loop radiative corrections with non-vanishing gluon mass. We find that higher order corrections to the pole mass and the top quark decay width are dominated by renormalons already in low orders and demonstrate the impact of eliminating the pole mass on the convergence of the perturbative series.