D-meson lifetimes within the heavy quark expansion

Abstract

Even if new data indicate that direct CP violation in D-meson decays is compatible with the standard model expectation, it has triggered a lot of interest, and charm phenomenology will remain an essential part of new physics searches due to its unique role as a probe for flavor-changing neutral currents among up-type quarks. Charm physics poses considerable theoretical challenges, because the charm mass is neither light nor truly heavy. The heavy quark expansion (HQE) provides a perturbative expansion in the inverse heavy quark mass for inclusive rates. It has proved to be very successful in the B sector, yet its validity for charm decays has often been questioned. We present results of a HQE study of D-meson lifetimes including NLO QCD and subleading 1/m_c corrections. We find good agreement with experimental data, but with huge hadronic uncertainties due to missing lattice input for hadronic matrix elements.

29 pages, 8 figures, Journal version