Ultrasoft contribution to heavy-quark pair production near threshold

We compute the third-order correction to the heavy-quark current correlation function due to the emission and absorption of an ultrasoft gluon. Our result supplies a missing contribution to top-quark pair production near threshold and the determination of the bottom quark mass from QCD sum rules.Comment: 10 pages, LaTe

Quarkonium polarization as a test of non-relativistic effective theory

I compare current approaches to quarkonium production with regard to what they tell us about quarkonium polarization. Predictions for $J/\psi$ polarization in hadron-hadron and photon-hadron collisions are summarized.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures included via epsf.sty, uses sprocl.sty (provided

Spectator scattering at NLO in non-leptonic B decays: Tree amplitudes

We compute the 1-loop (alpha_s^2) correction to hard spectator scattering in non-leptonic B decay tree amplitudes. This forms part of the NNLO contribution to the QCD factorization formula for hadronic B decays, and introduces a new rescattering phase that corrects the leading-order result for direct CP asymmetries. Among the technical issues, we discuss the cancellation of infrared divergences, and the treatment of evanescent four-quark operators. The infrared finiteness of our result establishes factorization of spectator scattering at the 1-loop order. Depending on the values of hadronic input parameters, the new 1-loop correction may have a significant impact on tree-dominated decays such as B -> pi pi.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, LaTe

Signatures of Color-Octet Quarkonium Production

I briefly review the nonrelativistic QCD picture of quarkonium production and its confrontation with experiment in various production processes.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure, sprocl.sty provided (To appear in the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Continuous Advances in QCD, Minneapolis, U.S.A., March 1996

CP Violation

Several pieces of direct and indirect evidence now suggest that the Kobayashi-Maskawa mechanism plays a distinguished role for CP violation at the electroweak scale. This talk provides a general overview of CP violation in its various contexts, emphasizing CP violation in flavour-violating interactions, such as due to the Kobayashi-Maskawa mechanism. I then review a few recent theoretical developments relevant to the interpretation of CP violation.Comment: 27 pages, LaTeX; plenary talk presented at the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, Budapest, July 2001; manuscript has some overlap with hep-lat/020101