Lattice QCD study of inclusive semileptonic decays of heavy mesons

TL;DR

This paper uses lattice QCD to analyze inclusive semileptonic decays of heavy mesons by extracting smeared spectral functions, providing a new ab initio approach that connects lattice data with theoretical predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lattice QCD method to study inclusive decays via spectral functions, bridging numerical simulations with theoretical frameworks.

Findings

Successful extraction of smeared spectral functions from lattice data

Agreement with operator-product expansion predictions

Demonstration of the method's viability for heavy meson decays

Abstract

We present an ab initio study of inclusive semileptonic decays of heavy mesons from lattice QCD. Our approach is based on a recently proposed method, that allows one to address the study of these decays from the analysis of smeared spectral functions extracted from four-point correlators on the lattice, where the smearing is defined in terms of the phase-space integration relevant to the inclusive decays. We present results obtained from gauge-field ensembles from the JLQCD and ETM collaborations, and discuss their relation with theoretical predictions from the operator-product expansion.