B - and D -meson leptonic decay constants from four-flavor lattice QCD

By A. Bazavov, C. Bernard, N. Brown, C. DeTar, A. El-Khadra, E. G'amiz, S. Gottlieb, U. Heller, J. Komijani, A. Kronfeld and 7 more. Physical Review D, 2017

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We calculate the leptonic decay constants of heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons with charm and bottom quarks in lattice quantum chromodynamics on four-flavor QCD gauge-field configurations with dynamical $u$, $d$, $s$, and $c$ quarks. We analyze over twenty isospin-symmetric ensembles with six lattice spacings down to $a\approx 0.03$~fm and several values of the light-quark mass down to the physical value $\frac{1}{2}(m_u+m_d)$. We employ the highly-improved staggered-quark (HISQ) action for the sea and valence quarks; on the finest lattice spacings, discretization errors are sufficiently small that we can calculate the $B$-meson decay constants with the HISQ action for the first time directly at the physical $b$-quark mass. We obtain the most precise determinations to-date of the $D$- and $B$-meson decay constants and their ratios, $f_{D^+} = 212.6 (0.5)$~MeV, $f_{D_s} = 249.8(0.4)$~MeV, $f_{D_s}/f_{D^+} = 1.1749(11)$, $f_{B^+} = 189.4(1.4)$~MeV, $f_{B_s} = 230.7(1.2)$~MeV, $f_{B_s}/f_{B^+} = 1.2180(49)$, where the errors include statistical and all systematic uncertainties. Our results for the $B$-meson decay constants are three times more precise than the previous best lattice-QCD calculations, and bring the QCD errors in the Standard-Model predictions for the rare leptonic decays $\overline{\mathcal{B}}(B_s \to \mu^+\mu^-) = 3.65(11) \times 10^{-9}$, $\overline{\mathcal{B}}(B^0 \to \mu^+\mu^-) = 1.00(3) \times 10^{-11}$, and $\overline{\mathcal{B}}(B^0 \to \mu^+\mu^-)/\overline{\mathcal{B}}(B_s \to \mu^+\mu^-) = 0.00264(7)$ to well below other sources of uncertainty. As a byproduct of our analysis, we also update our previously published results for the light-quark-mass ratios and the scale-setting quantities $f_{p4s}$, $M_{p4s}$, and $R_{p4s}$. We obtain the most precise lattice-QCD determination to date of the ratio $f_{K^+}/f_{\pi^+} = 1.1950(^{+15}_{-22})$~MeV.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a10e695788fd92b2497e1a5e91e376e8c3c95a88