2025/09/13 by Long Chen, Cong Zhao, Chen, Long +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.10786
openalex publication_date 2025/09/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We demonstrate that the leading IR-renormalon divergence in the perturbative pole mass of a massive quark resides entirely in the contribution from the trace anomaly of the energy-momentum tensor in QCD. Consequently, the recently proposed trace-anomaly-subtracted σ-mass definition for heavy quarks is not only scheme- and scale-invariant, but also free from the leading IR-renormalon ambiguity. We further derive a formula connecting this σ-mass to the perturbative pole mass, solely in terms of the QCD β-function, quark-mass anomalous dimension γm and a proper rewritten form of the pole-to-MS mass conversion factor. Utilizing this formula along with the ingredients available in the literature, we present the explicit five-loop result for the perturbative relationship between the σ-mass and the perturbative pole mass in QCD under the approximation of keeping only a single quark massive. Given the theoretical merits of this mass definition and the availability of high-precision conversion relations, we encourage its application to high-energy processes with heavy quarks, e.g., H → bb + XQCD, and to current-current correlators used in determining heavy-quark masses and decay widths.