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

QCD factorization for exclusive, non-leptonic B decays

Exclusive, non-leptonic, two-body decays of B mesons simplify greatly in the heavy quark limit. In this talk I discuss the factorized structure that holds in this limit and some of its consequences: (a) naive factorization is recovered in a certain limit; (b) `non-factorizable' effects are hard and can be calculated; (c) strong interaction phases vanish in the heavy quark limit (and can be calculated as well). As an illustration, I compute the penguin contribution to the decay $B_d\to\pi^+\pi^-$ and its effect on the determination of $\sin 2\alpha$.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, Talk presented at the `International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics' (EPS99), 15-21 July 1999, Tampere, Finlan

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