Bound-state parameters from dispersive sum rules for vacuum-to-vacuum correlators

We study the extraction of the ground-state parameters from vacuum-to-vacuum correlators. We work in a quantum-mechanical potential model which provides the only possibility to probe the reliability and the actual accuracy of this method; one obtains the bound-state parameters from the correlators by the standard procedures adopted in the method of sum rules and compares these results with the exact values calculated from the Schrodinger equation. We focus on the crucial ingredient of the method of sum rules-the effective continuum threshold-and propose a new algorithm to fix this quantity. In a quantum-mechanical model, our procedure leads to a remarkable improvement of the accuracy of the extracted ground-state parameters compared to the standard procedures adopted in the method and used in all previous applications of dispersive sum rules in QCD. The application of the proposed procedure in QCD promises a considerable increase of the accuracy of the extracted hadron parameters.