QCD Description of Hadronic Tau Decays

Abstract

The QCD analysis of hadronic tau decays is reviewed and a summary of the present phenomenological status is presented. The following topics are discussed: the determination of alpha_s(m_tau) = 0.338 +- 0.012 from the inclusive tau hadronic width, the measurement of |V_us| through the Cabibbo-suppressed decays of the tau, and the extraction of chiral-perturbation-theory couplings from the spectral tau data.

Comments: 9 pages, 1 figure. Invited talk at the 11th International Workshop on Tau Lepton Physics (Manchester, September 2010)