Threshold resummed spectra in B ->Xu l nu decays in NLO (III)

Abstract

We resum to next-to-leading order (NLO) the distribution in the light-cone momentum p+ = EX - |pX| and the spectrum in the electron energy, in the semileptonic decays B-> Xu l nu, where EX and pX are the total energy and three-momentum of the final hadron state Xu respectively. By expanding our formulas, we obtain the coefficients of all the infrared logarithms alpha^n L^k at order alpha^2 and at order alpha^3, with the exception of the alpha^3 L coefficient. We explicitly show that the relation between these semileptonic spectra and the hadron mass distribution in the radiative decay B -> Xs gamma is not a purely short distance one. By expanding our result for the p+ distribution and comparing it with the recent O(alpha^2 n_f) computation, we obtain an explicit and non trivial verification of our resummation scheme at the two-loop level. We also discuss the validity of the so-called Brodsky-Lepage-Mackenzie (BLM) scheme in the evaluation of the semileptonic spectra by comparing it with our results, finding that it is a reasonable approximation for the leading terms only. Finally, we show that long-distance phenomena, such as Fermi motion, are expected to have an effect on the electron spectrum smaller than on the hadron mass distribution.

Comments: 24 pages, no figures. Improved discussion on the BLM scheme