1996/06/21 by I. I. Bigi, Bigi, I. I.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/9606405
LATEX file, 14 pages, SPROCL.STY style file appended at the end; talk given at the Second Workshop on "Continuous Advances in QCD", March 1996
arxiv created 1996/06/21 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
The heavy quark expansion implemented through an operator product expansion provides us with a treatment of inclusive decays of beauty and charm hadrons that is genuinely derived from QCD,though it requires one additional assumption, namely that of 'local' quark-hadron duality. Subtleties in the application of factorization to hadronic expectation values are pointed out. The observed pattern in the charm lifetime ratios is reproduced in a semi-quantitative manner. The ratio τ(Λb)/τ(Bd) cannot be pushed significantly below 0.9 -- unless one invokes a new hitherto unknown paradigm for evaluating baryonic matrix elements. One confidently predicts τ(B-) to exceed τ(Bd) by several percent only. Failure of those predictions would force us to pay a hefty theoretical price, namely ultimately to abandon local duality as a practical concept.