English

Three-loop corrections to the Fermi decay constant in the $\overline{\rm{MS}}$ scheme

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-07-23 v1

Abstract

I present the leading 3-loop contributions to the Fermi decay constant in the Standard Model, using the tadpole-free pure MS\overline{\rm{MS}} scheme. The calculation is exact in the limit in which the QCD coupling, the top-quark Yukawa coupling, and the square root of the Higgs self-coupling are all treated as large compared to the electroweak gauge couplings. The effect of the 3-loop contribution is to decrease the estimate of the Higgs VEV, for fixed on-shell inputs, by about 3.5 MeV. The renormalization scale dependence of the computed Fermi constant is greatly reduced compared to the previously known complete 2-loop order result, and as a fraction is now less than ±2×106\pm 2 \times 10^{-6} for renormalization scales between 90 and 250 GeV. This corresponds to a theoretical uncertainty in the VEV that is well under 1 MeV, and much smaller than the current parametric uncertainties coming mostly from the top-quark mass. I also comment on the impact on the precise prediction of the WW-boson mass.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.15946,
  title  = {Three-loop corrections to the Fermi decay constant in the $\overline{\rm{MS}}$ scheme},
  author = {Stephen P. Martin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.15946},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

20 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:12:05.985Z