Eur. Phys. J. C (2026) 86: 161
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-026-15403-x

Letter

Determination of the strong coupling from high-energy data

II. Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Hamburg, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761, Hamburg, Germany

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Received: 30 October 2025
Accepted: 3 February 2026
Published online: 19 February 2026

Abstract

We determine the strong coupling from high-energy data for the Drell–Yan process and top-quark hadro-production collected at the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron combined with the world data on deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) and fixed-target Drell–Yan data. The theory description uses results at next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD in the $\overline{\text{MS}}$-scheme together with leading order QED evolution. The DIS data are subject to stringent kinematic cuts to suppress the contribution of power corrections. We apply a cut on the hadronic invariant mass squared $W^2\ge 12.5{\text{GeV}}^2$ together with a series of cuts on momentum transfer squared $Q^2$. Discarding higher-twist terms we find that the value of strong coupling ${\alpha }_s(m_Z)$ preferred by the data stabilizes at large enough cuts on $Q^2$, when low-$Q^2$ DIS data sensitive to power corrections are effectively removed. In particular, we extract the value of ${\alpha }_s(m_Z,N_f=5)=0.1152\pm 0.0008$ for $N_f=5$ light flavors with the cut $Q^2>10{\text{GeV}}^2$. In the absence of higher-twist terms less tight cuts on $Q^2$ show a clear deterioration of the fit and lead to rising values of the strong coupling, shifted upwards by about two standard deviations.