We present version 4.0 of the symbolic manipulation system FORM. The most important new features are manipulation of rational polynomials and the factorization of expressions. Many other new functions and commands are also added; some of them are very general, while others are designed for building specific high level packages, such as one for Groebner bases. New is also the checkpoint facility, that allows for periodic backups during long calculations. Lastly, FORM 4.0 has become available as open source under the GNU General Public License version 3.Comment: 26 pages. Uses axodra

Abstract:We have computed the five-loop corrections to the scale dependence of the renormalized coupling constant for Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), its generalization to non-Abelian gauge theories with a simple compact Lie group, and for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Our analytical result, obtained using the background field method, infrared rearrangement via a new diagram-by-diagram implementation of the R * operation and the Forcer program for massless four-loop propagators, confirms the QCD and QED results obtained by only one group before. The numerical size of the five-loop corrections is briefly discussed in the standard MS scheme for QCD with n f flavours and for pure SU(N ) Yang-Mills theory. Their effect in QCD is much smaller than the four-loop contributions, even at rather low scales.

We present the first determination of Higgs-boson decay to hadrons at the nextto-next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD in the limit of a heavy top quark and massless light flavours. This result has been obtained by computing the absorptive parts of the relevant five-loop self-energy for a general gauge group and combining the outcome with the corresponding coefficient function already known to this order in QCD. Our new result reduces the uncertainty due to the truncation of the perturbation series to a fraction of the uncertainty due to the present error of the strong coupling constant. We have also performed the corresponding but technically simpler computations for direct Higgs decay to bottom quarks and for the electromagnetic R-ratio in e + e − → hadrons, thus verifying important fifth-order results obtained only by one group so far.

We present the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N 3 LO) contributions to the non-singlet splitting functions for both parton distribution and fragmentation functions in perturbative QCD. The exact expressions are derived for the terms contributing in the limit of a large number of colours. For the remaining contributions, approximations are provided that are sufficient for all collider-physics applications. From their threshold limits we derive analytical and high-accuracy numerical results, respectively, for all contributions to the four-loop cusp anomalous dimension for quarks, including the terms proportional to quartic Casimir operators. We briefly illustrate the numerical size of the four-loop corrections, and the remarkable renormalization-scale stability of the N 3 LO results, for the evolution of the non-singlet parton distribution and the fragmentation functions. Our results appear to provide a first point of contact of four-loop QCD calculations and the so-called wrapping corrections to anomalous dimensions in N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory.

We have computed the contributions of the quartic Casimir invariants to the four-loop anomalous dimensions of twist-2 spin-N operators at N ≤ 16. The results provide new information on the structure of the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N 3 LO) splitting functions P (3)ik (x) for the evolution of parton distributions, and facilitate approximate expressions which include the quartic-Casimir contributions to the (light-like) gluon cusp anomalous dimension. These quantities turn out to be closely related, by a generalization of the lower-order 'Casimir scaling', to the corresponding quark results. Using these findings, we present an approximate result for the four-loop gluon cusp anomalous dimension in QCD which is sufficient for phenomenological applications.