Form factors for B meson weak decays in QCD light cone sum rules with a chiral current correlator

Abstract

We report some applications of QCD light cone sum rules (LCSR) to \(B\) meson weak decays. Special emphasis is on estimates of the form factors for \(B\) decays into a pseudoscalar (\(P\))/vector (\(V\)) meson, with a certain chiral current correlator. The main new ingredient, as compared with the case of the standard correlators, is that in the operator product expansion calculations, the contributions due to the twist-3 distribution amplitudes of the related light mesons, which are less known and would bring a larger uncertainty to the calculations with the standard correlators, cancel out fully in the \(B\rightarrow P\) case and do out partially in the \(B\rightarrow V\) one. An important observation, which is similar to that in soft collinear effective theory, is made in twist-3 approximation: whereas only one independent form factor is needed for parameterizing the hadronic matrix elements for a \(B\rightarrow P\) transition induced by all the relevant heavy-light quark currents, there exist two independent form factors under the condition of neglecting the terms suppressed by a factor of \(m_V^2\), for the \(B\rightarrow V\) transition. Therefore, the improved LCSR approach could be of stronger predictive power for the weak form factors. Also, this approach is employed to understand the \(B\rightarrow D\) transitions by introducing a leading twist-2 DA for an energetic \(D\) meson, combined with some of other QCD-based approaches. A detailed QCD next-to-leading order calculation of the \(B\rightarrow \pi \) form factors is presented for an illustrative purpose, and the sum rule results are used to extract the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix element \(|V_{ub}|\) from the latest BaBar data.