The Simplest B Decay, Precisely

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for the precise calculation of electromagnetic corrections in the leptonic decay of B mesons, enabling high-precision tests of the Standard Model and new physics.

Contribution

It presents the first complete study of QED effects at next-to-leading power in B decay, including EFT construction, operator basis, and resummation techniques.

Findings

Achieved percent-level accuracy in decay rate predictions.

Developed a new reduction scheme for Dirac structures avoiding evanescent operators.

Performed a detailed phenomenological analysis of decay contributions.

Abstract

We derive the QCD$\times$QED factorization theorem governing the leptonic decay $B^-\to\mu^-\bar\nu_\mu(\gamma)$ at all orders in $\alpha_s$ and $\alpha$. Electromagnetic corrections to this decay probe multiple scales, which we disentangle through a sequence of effective field theories (EFTs). The resulting state-of-the-art prediction for the photon-vetoed rate includes the complete structure-dependent component and is accurate at the percent level, establishing the theoretical framework required for future high-precision measurements of this channel, which will allow for a clean determination of $|V_{ub}|$ and powerful tests of new physics. Our work presents the first complete study of QED effects to an exclusive $B$-meson decay at next-to-leading power (NLP) in the heavy-quark expansion. Important milestones are (i) the construction of the complete NLP operator basis in soft-collinear effective theory (SCET); (ii) the proposal of a "SCET-friendly" reduction scheme for the Dirac structures of four-fermion operators in dimensional regularization, which avoids power-enhanced evanescent operators; (iii) the consistent refactorization of endpoint-divergent convolution integrals and the first complete resummation of "rapidity logarithms" arising at the boundary between the contributions involving soft and hard-collinear quarks; (iv) the systematic discussion of the EFT below the scale of QCD confinement and the non-perturbative matching of SCET onto this low-energy theory; (v) the decoupling of pseudoscalar mesons in the context of heavy-hadron chiral perturbation theory, so that they can be integrated out for processes in which they do not appear as external particles. We perform a phenomenological analysis of direct and indirect contributions to the decay rate and radiation-energy spectrum, highlighting the importance of the chiral anomaly.