Compelling evidence of renormalons in QCD from high order perturbative expansions

We compute the static self-energy of SU(3) gauge theory in four spacetime dimensions to order α20 in the strong coupling constant α. We employ lattice regularization to enable a numerical simulation within the framework of stochastic perturbation theory. We find perfect agreement with the factorial growth of high order coefficients predicted by the conjectured renormalon picture based on the operator product expansion. © 2012 American Physical Society.