Lifetimes and heavy quark expansion

By A. Lenz. 2015

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Kolya Uraltsev was one of the inventors of the Heavy Quark Expansion (HQE), that describes inclusive weak decays of hadrons containing heavy quarks and in particular lifetimes. Besides giving a pedagogic introduction to the subject, we review the development and the current status of the HQE, which just recently passed several non-trivial experimental tests with an unprecedented precision. In view of many new experimental results for lifetimes of heavy hadrons, we also update several theory predictions: , τ(Bs)/τ(Bd) = 1.001 ±0.002, τ(Λb)/τ(Bd) = 0.935 ±0.054 and . The theoretical precision is currently strongly limited by the unknown size of the non-perturbative matrix elements of four-quark operators, which could be determined with lattice simulations.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef9c225c987926995a500c4af768139b83b2b171