Complete Intersecting Non-Extreme p-Branes

We give general intersecting brane solutions without assuming any restriction on the metric in supergravity coupled to a dilaton and antisymmetric tensor fields in arbitrary dimensions $D$. The result is a general class of intersecting brane solutions which interpolate the non-extreme solutions of type 1 and 2. We also discuss the relation of our solutions to the known single brane solution.Comment: 13 pages, a footnote is added, version to appear in PL

Perturbative corrections to B→DB \to D form factors in QCD

We compute perturbative QCD corrections to $B \to D$ form factors at leading power in $\Lambda/m_b$, at large hadronic recoil, from the light-cone sum rules (LCSR) with $B$-meson distribution amplitudes in HQET. QCD factorization for the vacuum-to-$B$-meson correlation function with an interpolating current for the $D$-meson is demonstrated explicitly at one loop with the power counting scheme $m_c \sim {\cal O} \left (\sqrt{\Lambda \, m_b} \right )$. The jet functions encoding information of the hard-collinear dynamics in the above-mentioned correlation function are complicated by the appearance of an additional hard-collinear scale $m_c$, compared to the counterparts entering the factorization formula of the vacuum-to-$B$-meson correction function for the construction of $B \to \pi$ from factors. Inspecting the next-to-leading-logarithmic sum rules for the form factors of $B \to D \ell \nu$ indicates that perturbative corrections to the hard-collinear functions are more profound than that for the hard functions, with the default theory inputs, in the physical kinematic region. We further compute the subleading power correction induced by the three-particle quark-gluon distribution amplitudes of the $B$-meson at tree level employing the background gluon field approach. The LCSR predictions for the semileptonic $B \to D \ell \nu$ form factors are then extrapolated to the entire kinematic region with the $z$-series parametrization. Phenomenological implications of our determinations for the form factors $f_{BD}^{+, 0}(q^2)$ are explored by investigating the (differential) branching fractions and the $R(D)$ ratio of $B \to D \ell \nu$ and by determining the CKM matrix element $|V_{cb}|$ from the total decay rate of $B \to D \mu \nu_{\mu}$.Comment: 49 pages, 8 figures, version accepted for publication in JHE

QCD calculations of B→π,KB \to \pi, K form factors with higher-twist corrections

We update QCD calculations of $B \to \pi, K$ form factors at large hadronic recoil by including the subleading-power corrections from the higher-twist $B$-meson light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs) up to the twist-six accuracy and the strange-quark mass effects at leading-power in $\Lambda/m_b$ from the twist-two $B$-meson LCDA $\phi_B^{+}(\omega, \mu)$. The higher-twist corrections from both the two-particle and three-particle $B$-meson LCDAs are computed from the light-cone QCD sum rules (LCSR) at tree level. In particular, we construct the local duality model for the twist-five and -six $B$-meson LCDAs, in agreement with the corresponding asymptotic behaviours at small quark and gluon momenta, employing the QCD sum rules in heavy quark effective theory at leading order in $\alpha_s$. The strange quark mass effects in semileptonic $B \to K$ form factors yield the leading-power contribution in the heavy quark expansion, consistent with the power-counting analysis in soft-collinear effective theory, and they are also computed from the LCSR approach due to the appearance of the rapidity singularities. We further explore the phenomenological aspects of the semileptonic $B \to \pi \ell \nu$ decays and the rare exclusive processes $B \to K \nu \nu$, including the determination of the CKM matrix element $|V_{ub}|$, the normalized differential $q^2$ distributions and precision observables defined by the ratios of branching fractions for the above-mentioned two channels in the same intervals of $q^2$.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figure