Electroweak effective couplings for future precision experiments

Abstract

The leading hadronic effects in electroweak theory derive from vacuum polarization which are non-perturbative hadronic contributions to the running of the gauge couplings, the electromagnetic alpha_{em}(s) and the SU(2)_L coupling alpha_2(s). I will report on my recent package "alphaQED", which besides the effective fine structure constant alpha_{em}(s) also allows for a fairly precise calculation of the SU(2)_L gauge coupling alpha_2(s). I will briefly review the role, future requirements and possibilities. Applied together with the "Rhad" package by Harlander and Steinhauser, the package allows to calculate all SM running couplings as well as running sin^2 Theta versions with state-of-the-art accuracy.

Comments: 10 pages, 3 figures