Renormalization scale setting for heavy quark pair production in e+e− annihilation near the threshold region

Abstract

Heavy fermion pair production in $e^+e^-$ annihilation is a fundamental process in hadron physics and is of considerable interest for various phenomena. In this paper, we will apply the Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC) to provide a comprehensive analysis of these processes. The PMC provides a systematic, unambiguous method for determining the renormalization scales of the QCD coupling constant for single-scale and multiple-scale applications. The resulting predictions eliminate any renormalization scheme-and-scale ambiguities, eliminate the factorial renormalon divergences, and are consistent with the requirements of the renormalization group. It is remarkable that two distinctly different scales are determined by using the PMC for heavy fermion pair production near the threshold region. One scale is the order of the fermion mass $m_f$, which enters the hard virtual corrections, and the other scale is of order $ v\,m_f$, where $v$ is the quark velocity, which enters the Coulomb rescattering amplitude. The PMC scales yield the correct physical behavior and reflect the virtuality of the propagating gluons (photons) for the QCD (QED) processes. Moreover, we demonstrate the consistency of PMC scale setting from QCD to QED. Perfect agreement between the Abelian unambiguous Gell-Mann-Low and the PMC scale-setting methods in the limit of zero number of colors is demonstrated.