QCD improved top-quark decay at next-to-next-to-leading order

Rui-Qing Meng; Sheng-Quan Wang; Ting Sun; Chao-Qin Luo; Jian-Ming Shen; Xing-Gang Wu

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11224-4

2022 Impact factor 4.4

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2023) 83: 59
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11224-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

QCD improved top-quark decay at next-to-next-to-leading order

Rui-Qing Meng¹, Sheng-Quan Wang¹^b, Ting Sun¹, Chao-Qin Luo¹, Jian-Ming Shen² and Xing-Gang Wu³

¹ Department of Physics, Guizhou Minzu University, 550025, Guiyang, People’s Republic of China
² School of Physics and Electronics, Hunan University, 410082, Changsha, People’s Republic of China
³ Department of Physics, Chongqing Key Laboratory for Strongly Coupled Physics, Chongqing University, 401331, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China

^b sqwang@cqu.edu.cn

Received: 24 March 2022
Accepted: 13 January 2023
Published online: 23 January 2023

Abstract

We analyse the top-quark decay at the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD by using the Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC) which provides a systematic way to eliminate renormalization scheme and scale ambiguities in perturbative QCD predictions. The PMC renormalization scales of the coupling constant are determined by absorbing the non-conformal terms that govern the behavior of the running coupling by using the Renormalization Group Equation (RGE). We obtain the PMC scale GeV for the top-quark decay, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the conventional choice , reflecting the small virtuality of the QCD dynamics of the top-quark decay process. Moreover, due to the non-conformal terms disappear in the pQCD series, there is no renormalon divergence and the NLO QCD correction term is greatly increased while the NNLO QCD correction term is suppressed compared to the conventional results obtained at . By further including the next-to-leading (NLO) electroweak corrections, the finite W boson width and the finite bottom quark mass, we obtain the top-quark total decay width GeV, where the error is the squared averages of the top-quark mass GeV, the coupling constant and the estimation of unknown higher-order terms using the PAA method with [N/M]=[1/1]. The PMC improved predictions for the top-quark decay are complementary to the previous PMC calculations for top-quark pair production and helpful for detailed studies of properties of the top-quark.

© The Author(s) 2023

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