QCD light-cone distribution amplitudes of heavy mesons from boosted HQET

Abstract

Abstract Light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs) frequently arise in factorization theorems involving light and heavy mesons. The QCD LCDA for heavy mesons includes short-distance physics at energy scales of the heavy-quark mass. In this paper we achieve the separation of this perturbative scale from the purely hadronic effects by matching the QCD LCDA to the convolution of a perturbative function with the universal, quark-mass independent LCDA defined in heavy-quark effective theory. This factorization allows to resum potentially large logarithms between ΛQCD and mQ as well as between mQ and the scale Q of the hard process in the production of boosted heavy mesons at colliders. As an application we derive new theoretical predictions for the branching ratio of the decay W± → B±γ. Furthermore, we provide phenomenological models for the QCD LCDAs of both the $$ \overline{B} $$ B ¯ and D mesons expressed as expansions in Gegenbauer polynomials.