Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

An updated analysis of vector and axial-vector spectral functions is presented. The resonant contributions to the spectral integrals are shown to be expressible as multiples of 4 pi^2 f_pi^2, encoding the scale of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in QCD. Up to order T^2 this behavior carries over to the case of finite temperature.

Hadronic tau decay data is used to study the reliability of various finite energy sum rules (FESR's). For intermediate scales (of order 2-3 GeV^2), those FESR's with weights s^k are found to have significant errors, whereas those with weights having a zero at the juncture (s=s_0) of the cut and circular part of the contour work very well. It is also shown that a combination of two such sum rules allows rather strong constraints to be placed on the hadronic spectral function without sacrificing the excellent agreement between OPE and hadronic representations. The method then is applied to the strangeness -1 and pseudoscalar isovector channels, where it is shown to provide novel constraints on those ansatze for the unmeasured continuum parts of the spectral functions employed in existing extractions of m_u+m_d, m_s. The continuum ans\"atz in the latter channel, in particular, is shown to produce a rather poor match to the corresponding OPE representation, hence re-opening the question of the value of the light quark mass combination m_u+m_d.

Studies of quarkonium spectral functions at finite temperature, based on an approach combining QCD sum rules and the maximum entropy method are briefly reviewed. QCD sum rules for heavy quarkonia incorporate finite temperature effects in form of changing values of gluonic condensates that appear in the operator product expansion. These changes depend on the energy density and pressure at finite temperature, which we extract from quenched lattice QCD calculations. The maximum entropy method then allows us to obtain the most probable spectral function from the sum rules, without having to introduce any specific assumption about its functional form. Our findings suggest that the charmonium ground states of both S-wave and P-wave channels dissolve into the continuum already at temperatures around or slightly above the critical temperature T_c, while the bottomonium states are less influenced by temperature effects, surviving up to about 2.5 T_c or higher for S-wave and up to about 2.0 T_c for P-wave states.