A Virial Theorem for the Kinetic Energy of a Heavy Quark inside Hadrons

Abstract

The formalism of the heavy quark effective theory is used to derive the field-theory analog of the virial theorem, which relates the matrix element of the kinetic energy of a heavy quark inside a hadron to a matrix element of the gluon field strength tensor. The existing QCD sum rule calculations of the kinetic energy are not consistent with this theorem.