Heavy quark symmetry in the soft collinear effective theory

Abstract

We study strong interaction effects in nonleptonic decays of ... mesons with energetic particles in the final state. An introduction to Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET), the appropriate effective field theory of QCD for such decays, is given. We focus on decays of the type ... where M is a light energetic meson of energy E. The SCET formulates the problem as an expansion in powers of where Q [approx.] ... . A factorization theorem is proven at leading order that separates the physics of the scales ... . In addition, the factorization theorem decouples energetic degrees of freedom associated with the light meson allowing us to derive heavy quark symmetry relations between the ... type amplitudes. A new mechanism for the generation of non-perturbative strong phases is shown within the framework of factorization. Heavy quark symmetry relations are shown to apply for these strong phases as well. Furthermore, the strong phases for certain light mesons in the final state are shown to be universal. The analysis is extended to ... type decays with isosinglet light mesons and excited charmed mesons in the final state respectively. A host of other phenomenological relations are derived and found to be in good agreement with available data.