# $B$ Decay Constants from NRQCD with Dynamical Fermions

## TL;DR

This paper investigates heavy-light meson decay constants using lattice QCD with NRQCD and dynamical fermions, revealing a larger than expected slope in decay constants and identifying dominant kinetic energy effects, while highlighting systematic uncertainties.

## Contribution

It provides the first non-perturbative extraction of the slope coefficients from heavy quark interactions and analyzes the impact of dynamical sea quarks on decay constants.

## Key findings

- The slope of decay constants with 1/M is larger than naive expectations.
- The kinetic energy of the heavy quark dominates the slope.
- Systematic errors around the B meson mass are estimated at about 20%.

## Abstract

We present a lattice investigation of the heavy-light meson decay constants using Wilson light quarks and NRQCD heavy quarks, partially including the effects of dynamical sea quarks. We calculate the pseudoscalar and vector decay constants over a wide range in heavy quark mass and are able to perform a detailed analysis of heavy quark symmetry. We find consistency between the extrapolation of the NRQCD results and the static case, as expected. We find the slope of the decay constants with $1/M$ is significantly larger than naive expectations and the results of previous lattice calculations. For the first time we extract the non-perturbative coefficients of the slope arising from the $O(1/M)$ heavy quark interactions separately and show the kinetic energy of the heavy quark is dominant and responsible for the large slope. In addition, we find that significant systematic errors remain in the decay constant extracted around the $B$ meson mass due to truncating the NRQCD series at $O(1/M)$. We estimate the higher order contributions to $f_B$ are approximately $20\%$; roughly the same size as the systematic errors introduced by using the Wilson action for light quarks.