Exclusive rare B -> K*e+e- decays at low recoil: controlling the long-distance effects

Abstract

We present a model-independent description of the exclusive rare decays B-> K* e+e- in the low recoil region (large lepton invariant mass q^2 ~ m_b^2). In this region the long-distance effects from quark loops can be computed with the help of an operator product expansion in 1/Q, with Q={m_b, \sqrt{q^2}}. Nonperturbative effects up to and including terms suppressed by Lambda/Q and mc^2/mb^2 relative to the short-distance amplitude can be included in a model-independent way. Based on these results, we propose an improved method for determining the CKM matrix element |V{ub}| from a combination of rare and semileptonic B and D decays near the zero recoil point. The residual theoretical uncertainty from long distance effects in this |V{ub}| determination comes from terms in the OPE of order alpha_s(Q)Λ/mb, alpha_s^2(Q), mc^4/mb^4$ and duality violations and is estimated to be below 10%.