Lifetimes of Heavy-Flavour Hadrons -- Whence and Whither?

Abstract

A theoretical treatment for the weak decays of heavy-flavour hadrons has been developed that is genuinely based on QCD. Its methodology as it applies to total lifetimes and the underlying theoretical issues are sketched. Predictions are compared with present data. One discrepancy emerges: the beauty baryon lifetime appears to be significantly shorter than expected. The ramifications of those findings are analyzed in detail.

15 pages, no figures, LATEX, two references added and new information concerning a lower charm content in B decays incorporated

References in corpus (7)

• Nonperturbative Corrections to Inclusive Beauty and Charm Decays: QCD versus Phenomenological Models
• Sum Rules for Heavy Flavor Transitions in the SV Limit
• Next--to--Leading Order Corrections to Meson Masses in the Heavy Quark Effective Theory
• The Baffling Semileptonic Branching Ratio of $B$ Mesons
• $|V_{cb}|$ from OPE Sum Rules for Heavy Flavor Transitions
• Weak Annihilation and the Endpoint Spectrum in Semileptonic B Decays
• $D_s$ Lifetime, $m_b$, $m_c$ and $|V_{cb}|$ in the Heavy Quark Expansion

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Physics of the B Factories
• Measurement of the Bs0 Meson Lifetime Using Semileptonic Decays
• Measurement of the B^0 and B^+ meson lifetimes with fully reconstructed hadronic final states
• Measurement of the B^0_s lifetime in the exclusive decay channel B^0_s -> J/psi phi
• Measurement of the B0 Lifetime with Partially Reconstructed B0 --> D*- l+ nu Decays