TTP01-19 The Cross Section of e^+ e^- Annihilation into Hadrons of Order alpha_s^4 n_f^2 in Perturbative QCD

We present the first genuine QCD five-loop calculation of the vacuum polarization functions: analytical terms of order alpha_s^4 n_f^2 to the absorptive parts of vector and scalar correlators. These corrections form an important gauge-invariant subset of the full O(alpha_s^4) correction to $e^+ e^- annihilation into hadrons and the Higgs decay rate into hadrons respectively. They discriminate between different widely used estimates of the full result.