Rare radiative B decays in perturbative QCD

Abstract

We report on recent progress on perturbative QCD calculations of certain exclusive rare weak $B$ meson decays involving hard photons. In the limit of a photon energy $E_\gamma$ much larger than $\Lambda_{QCD}$, the amplitudes for such processes can be analyzed in a twist expansion in powers of $\Lambda/E_\gamma$. The leading twist amplitude is given by the convolution of a hard scattering amplitude with the $B$ meson light-cone wavefunction. This approach is applied to a calculation of the leptonic radiative $B\to \gamma \ell \nu_\ell$ formfactors and to an estimate of the weak annihilation contribution to the penguin decays $B\to \rho(\omega)\gamma$. As an application we discuss a few methods for constraining the unitarity triangle with exclusive radiative B decays.