Structure functions for the inclusive semileptonic $b$-quark decay at NNLO: a semi-analytic calculation

Abstract

We present a study of the inclusive charmless semileptonic $b$ decay, $b\to X_u\ell\bar{\nu}$ at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD, with the primary aim of extracting the hadronic structure functions $W_i$ at NNLO. The analysis is based on a numerical calculation of the relevant kinematic distributions using a phase-space slicing method to handle infrared-sensitive contributions from real gluon emissions. We use known results from Heavy Quark Effective Theory and Soft-Collinear Effective Theory to extract the singular terms and construct a model for the regular contributions to the structure functions at NNLO, then perform a fit to the numerical results. We use our approximate structure functions to compute various kinematic distributions and moments: the comparison with existing analytic and numerical results shows very good agreement, which is further improved including the available analytic results in the fit.