Semileptonic decays of heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons

I discuss the results of a recent quenched lattice calculation of the two independent form factors parametrizing the semileptonic decays between heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons. The differential decay rate of the process B --> D l nu has been calculated at non vanishing momentum transfer both in the case of the light leptons, l=e,mu, and in the case of a non vanishing lepton mass, l=tau.Comment: Talk presented at Lattice2007, Regensburg, July 30 - August 4, 2007; 7 pages, 3 figure

Lattice calculation of isospin corrections to Kl2 and Kl3 decays

In this talk I discuss the theoretical issues associated with lattice calculations of isospin breaking corrections to hadronic matrix elements. I concentrate on the calculation of QCD isospin breaking effects for the Kl2 and Kl3 decay rates and illustrate the recent lattice results obtained by the RM123 collaboration.Comment: Proceedings of CKM 2012, the 7th International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle, University of Cincinnati, USA, 28 September - 2 October 201

Isospin Breaking Effects on the Lattice

Isospin symmetry is not exact and the corrections to the isosymmetric limit are, in general, at the percent level. For gold plated quantities, such as pseudoscalar meson masses or the kaon leptonic and semileptonic decay rates, these effects are of the same order of magnitude of the errors quoted in nowadays lattice calculations and cannot be neglected any longer. In this talk I discuss the methods that have been developed in the last few years to calculate isospin breaking corrections by starting from first principles lattice simulations. In particular, I discuss how to perform a combined QCD+QED lattice simulation and a renormalization prescription to be used in order to separate QCD from QED isospin breaking effects. A brief review of recent lattice results of isospin breaking effects on the hadron spectrum is also included.Comment: 15 pages, plenary talk presented at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2013), 29 July - 3 August 2013, Mainz, German

Non-perturbative improvement of quark mass renormalization in two-flavour lattice QCD

We non-perturbatively determine the renormalization constant and the improvement coefficients relating the renormalized current and subtracted quark mass in O(a) improved two-flavour lattice QCD. We employ the Schr\"odinger functional scheme and fix the physical extent of the box by working at a constant value of the renormalized coupling. Our calculation yields results which cover two regions of bare parameter space. One is the weak-coupling region suitable for volumes of about half a fermi. By making simulations in this region, quarks as heavy as the bottom can be propagated with the full relativistic QCD action and renormalization problems in HQET can be solved non-perturbatively by a matching to QCD in finite volume. The other region refers to the common parameter range in large-volume simulations of two-flavour lattice QCD, where our results have particular relevance for charm physics applications.Comment: 31 pages including figures and tables, latex2e, uses JHEP3.cls; revised version published in JHEP, clarifying remarks and references added; typo(s) corrected, especially in eq. (3.10

On the extraction of spectral densities from lattice correlators

Hadronic spectral densities are important quantities whose non-perturbative knowledge allows for calculating phenomenologically relevant observables, such as inclusive hadronic cross-sections and non-leptonic decay-rates. The extraction of spectral densities from lattice correlators is a notoriously difficult problem because lattice simulations are performed in Euclidean time and lattice data are unavoidably affected by statistical and systematic uncertainties. In this paper we present a new method for extracting hadronic spectral densities from lattice correlators. The method allows for choosing a smearing function at the beginning of the procedure and it provides results for the spectral densities smeared with this function together with reliable estimates of the associated uncertainties. The same smearing function can be used in the analysis of correlators obtained on different volumes, such that the infinite volume limit can be studied in a consistent way. While the method is described by using the language of lattice simulations, in reality it is completely general and can profitably be used to cope with inverse problems arising in different fields of research.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures. Updated to match published versio

DsD_s physics from fine lattices

We present a preliminary analysis of the charm quark mass and the mass and decay constant $f_{D_s}$ of the $D_s$ meson obtained from dynamical simulations of $N_f = 2$ Wilson QCD on the large and fine lattices simulated by the CLS effort.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; talk presented at Lattice 2008, XXVI International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-19, 2008, Williamsburg, Virginia, US

Remarks on the discretization of physical momenta in lattice QCD

The calculation on the lattice of cross--sections, form--factors and decay rates associated to phenomenologically relevant physical processes is complicated by the spatial momenta quantization rule arising from the introduction of limited box sizes in numerical simulations. A method to overcome this problem, based on the adoption of two distinct boundary conditions for two fermions species on a finite lattice, is here discussed and numerical results supporting the physical significance of this procedure are shown.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, Talk presented at Lattice2004(spectrum

Radiative corrections to decay amplitudes in lattice QCD

The precision of lattice QCD computations of many quantities has reached such a precision that isospin-breaking corrections, including electromagnetism, must be included if further progress is to be made in extracting fundamental information, such as the values of Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements, from experimental measurements. We discuss the framework for including radiative corrections in leptonic and semileptonic decays of hadrons, including the treatment of infrared divergences. We briefly review isospin breaking in leptonic decays and present the first numerical results for the ratio $\Gamma(K_{\mu2})/\Gamma(\pi_{\mu2})$ in which these corrections have been included. We also discuss the additional theoretical issues which arise when including electromagnetic corrections to semileptonic decays, such as $K_{\ell3}$ decays. The separate definition of strong isospin-breaking effects and those due to electromagnetism requires a convention. We define and advocate conventions based on hadronic schemes, in which a chosen set of hadronic quantities, hadronic masses for example, are set equal in QCD and in QCD+QED. This is in contrast with schemes which have been largely used to date, in which the renormalised $\alpha_s(\mu)$ and quark masses are set equal in QCD and in QCD+QED in some renormalisation scheme and at some scale $\mu$.Comment: Presented at the 36th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2018), Michigan State University, July 22nd - 28th 201

Quenched lattice calculation of semileptonic heavy-light meson form factors

We calculate, in the continuum limit of quenched lattice QCD, the matrix elements of the heavy-heavy vector current between heavy-light pseudoscalar meson states. We present the form factors for different values of the initial and final meson masses at finite momentum transfer. In particular, we calculate the non-perturbative correction to the differential decay rate of the process B --> D l nu including the case of a non-vanishing lepton mass.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, version accepted for publication on JHE