Leading hadronic contributions to the running of the electroweak coupling constants from lattice QCD

Abstract

The quark-connected leading-order hadronic contributions to the running of the electromagnetic fine structure constant, α QED, and the weak mixing angle, θ W , are determined by a four-flavour lattice QCD computation with twisted mass fermions. Full agreement of the results with a phenomenological analysis is observed with an even comparable statistical uncertainty. We show that the uncertainty of the lattice calculation is dominated by systematic effects which then leads to significantly larger errors than obtained by the phenomenological analysis.