Lepton energy distributions in heavy meson decays from QCD

Junegone Chay, Howard Georgi, Benjamin Grinstein

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505 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We use the techniques of an effective field theory for heavy quark systems to calculate inclusive lepton energy distributions in heavy meson decays. Our approach is patterned after the operator product expansion analysis of R in e+ -e- annihilation and deep inelastic electroproduction. We extend the idea of an operator product expansion to a situation in which we match the physics from a T-product in the high energy theory to a set of local operators in the low energy effective heavy quark field theory. In leading order we reproduce the results of the parton model, but we can also describe the corrections systematically. We are led to the rather surprising conclusion that there are no nonperturbative corrections of order mbΛQCD to the average invariant mass-squared of the final hadronic state.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)399-405
Number of pages7
JournalPhysics Letters B
Volume247
Issue number2-3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1990 Sept 13
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
2 Research supported in part by the National Science Founda-tion under Grant No. PHY82-17853, supplemented by funds from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Funding Information:
In section 2, we set up the problem for the specific case of the semileptonic B decay. In section 3, we discuss the operator product expansion and the heavy quark effective field theory. Here we will see how to recover the parton model description of B decay as -A-Research supported in part by the National Science Founda-tion under Grant #PHY-8714654. Preprint #HUTP-90/ A035.6/90. Permanent address: Department of Physics, FM-15, Univer-sity of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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