At one loop, writing makes the renormalization-group beta function . For a positive running coupling grows towards high energies and decreases towards the infrared. Extrapolation of the one-loop expression gives a finite ultraviolet Landau pole; perturbation theory fails before it reaches that pole. For , the coupling decreases towards high energies, giving asymptotic freedom, and grows towards the infrared. The formal infrared pole identifies a strong-coupling scale, where the weak-coupling approximation no longer applies. These conclusions concern the small-coupling branch; a pole in the perturbative solution does not establish a pole in the exact theory. If , higher-order terms decide the running.
From ,
Integrating the one-loop beta function gives
These formulas retain the same particle content and neglect threshold corrections throughout the interval. For , the formal pole is ; for the analogous scale lies below .
For one-loop normalized hypercharge unification, the normalized hypercharge coupling is , so its inverse and one-loop slope are and . Define
Equality of the three normalized inverses at the unification scale gives
Eliminating proves
This expression assumes . If these slopes coincide, unification first requires , and the displayed division is unavailable. A unification scale above additionally requires the inferred to be positive. The relation is a consistency condition under the stated one-loop assumptions, not proof that the measured couplings unify without threshold effects.
For the two-loop running coupling, the claimed logarithmic asymptotic concerns the asymptotically free branch with and . Set
The differential equation becomes . Separating variables yields
A change of the strong-coupling scale absorbs any additive constant . Choose that scale so that . On the large positive- branch the exact implicit relation is then
It first gives . Substituting this back into the logarithm gives . To determine the error rather than assume it, write . Expansion of the exact implicit relation yields
Consequently the mathematically correct two-loop asymptotic is
More precisely, the next term is . For this is not : multiplying the remainder by makes it grow as . No fixed change of can remove this term. Such a change adds a constant to and changes only constant or contributions, rather than the coefficient of . Thus the two leading terms requested are correct, but the literal remainder printed in the PDF is too small. This is the two-loop inverse-coupling logarithmic remainder.
If , the one-loop result is exact after choosing . If , the displayed expansion is undefined and the differential equation instead gives . For , a positive weak coupling does not approach zero at arbitrarily large along the branch used above. The asymptotic assumptions therefore matter as well as the remainder.