The Photon Spectrum in Upsilon Decays

Abstract

We present a theoretical prediction for the photon spectrum in radiative Upsilon decay. Parts of the spectrum have already been understood, but an understanding of the endpoint region has remained elusive. In this paper we provide the missing piece, and resolve a controversy in the literature. We treat the endpoint region of Upsilon -> X gamma decay within the framework of the soft-collinear effective theory (SCET). Within this approach the Upsilon structure function arises naturally, and kinematic logarithms are summed by running operators using renormalization group equations. In a previous paper we studied the color-octet contribution to the decay. Here we treat the color-singlet contribution. We combine our result with previous results to obtain the Upsilon -> X gamma spectrum. We find that resumming the color-singlet contribution in the endpoint gives a result that is in much better agreement with the data than the leading order prediction.