Study of Bbar --> Xu l nubar decays in BBbar events tagged by a fully reconstructed B-meson decay and determination of |V_{ub}|

TL;DR

This study measures the partial branching fractions of charmless semileptonic B decays and determines the CKM matrix element |V_{ub}| using a large dataset, fully reconstructed B-meson decays, and multiple QCD predictions to improve precision.

Contribution

It provides a new measurement of |V_{ub}| with reduced uncertainties by analyzing inclusive charmless semileptonic B decays with a novel approach and multiple theoretical models.

Findings

Partial branching fraction DeltaB = (1.80 ± 0.13 (stat.) ± 0.15 (sys.) ± 0.02 (theo.)) × 10^{-3} for p_l^* > 1.0 GeV

Extracted |V_{ub}| = (4.33 ± 0.24 (exp.) ± 0.15 (theo.)) × 10^{-3} from the data

Determined partial branching fractions for B^0 and B^- decays and set limits on isospin breaking.

Abstract

We report measurements of partial branching fractions for inclusive charmless semileptonic B decays Bbar --> Xu l nubar, and the determination of the CKM matrix element |V_{ub}|. The analysis is based on a sample of 467 million Upsilon(4S) --> BBar decays recorded with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II e^+ e^- storage rings. We select events in which the decay of one of the B mesons is fully reconstructed and an electron or a muon signals the semileptonic decay of the other B meson. We measure partial branching fractions DeltaB in several restricted regions of phase space and determine the CKM element |V_{ub}| based on four different QCD predictions. For decays with a charged lepton momentum p_l^* > 1.0 GeV in the B meson rest frame, we obtain DeltaB = (1.80 \pm 0.13 (stat.) \pm 0.15 (sys.) \pm 0.02 (theo.)) \times 10^{-3} from a fit to the two-dimensional mX-q^2 distribution. Here, mX refers to the invariant mass of the final state hadron X and q^2 is the invariant mass squared of the charged lepton and neutrino. From this measurement we extract |V_{ub}| = (4.33\pm 0.24 (exp.) \pm 0.15 (theo.)) \times 10^{-3} as the arithmetic average of four results obtained from four different QCD predictions of the partial rate. We separately determine partial branching fractions for B^0 and B^- decays and derive a limit on the isospin breaking in Bbar --> Xu l nubar decays.