Moments of the B Meson Inclusive Semileptonic Decay Rate using Neutrino Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper measures the moments of B meson inclusive semileptonic decay distributions using neutrino reconstruction, providing data to test theoretical models like HQET and OPE.

Contribution

It introduces a novel neutrino reconstruction method to analyze B meson decays and extracts moments of the decay distributions with minimized lepton energy thresholds.

Findings

Measured <M_X^2 - M_D^2> moments with different lepton energy cuts.

Compared experimental moments to HQET and OPE predictions.

Quantified uncertainties from statistics, systematics, and models.

Abstract

We present a measurement of the composition of B meson inclusive semileptonic decays using 9.4 fb^-1 of e^+e^- data taken with the CLEO detector at the Upsilon(4S) resonance. In addition to measuring the charged lepton kinematics, the neutrino four-vector is inferred using the hermiticity of the detector. We perform a maximum likelihood fit over the full three-dimensional differential decay distribution for the fractional contributions from the B -> X_c l nu processes with X_c = D, D*, D**, and nonresonant X_c, and the process B -> X_u l nu. From the fit results we extract the first and second moments of the M_X^2 and q^2 distributions with minimum lepton-energy requirements of 1.0 GeV and 1.5 GeV. We find <M_X^2 - M_D[Bar]^2> = 0.456 +- 0.014 +- 0.045 +- 0.109 (GeV/c^2)^2 with a minimum lepton energy of 1.0 GeV and <M_X^2 - M_D[Bar]^2> = 0.293 +- 0.012 +- 0.033 +- 0.048 (GeV/c^2)^2 with minimum lepton energy of 1.5 GeV. The uncertainties are from statistics, detector systematic effects, and model dependence, respectively. As a test of the HQET and OPE calculations, the results for the M^X_c moment as a function of the minimum lepton energy requirement are compared to the predictions.