Radiative corrections to decay amplitudes in lattice QCD

Abstract

The precision of lattice QCD computations of many quantities has reached such a precision that isospin-breaking corrections, including electromagnetism, must be included if further progress is to be made in extracting fundamental information, such as the values of Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements, from experimental measurements. We discuss the framework for including radiative corrections in leptonic and semileptonic decays of hadrons, including the treatment of infrared divergences. We briefly review isospin breaking in leptonic decays and present the first numerical results for the ratio $\Gamma(K_{\mu2})/\Gamma(\pi_{\mu2})$ in which these corrections have been included. We also discuss the additional theoretical issues which arise when including electromagnetic corrections to semileptonic decays, such as $K_{\ell3}$ decays. The separate definition of strong isospin-breaking effects and those due to electromagnetism requires a convention. We define and advocate conventions based on hadronic schemes, in which a chosen set of hadronic quantities, hadronic masses for example, are set equal in QCD and in QCD+QED. This is in contrast with schemes which have been largely used to date, in which the renormalised $\alpha_s(\mu)$ and quark masses are set equal in QCD and in QCD+QED in some renormalisation scheme and at some scale $\mu$.