Form Factors in the Heavy Quark and Chiral Limit: Pole dominance in $\bar B\to πe \barν_e$

Abstract

It is shown that the form factors in the semileptonic decay of ground state heavy mesons to light pseudoscalar mesons are dominated by the vector meson pole at all momentum transfers. First, the general approaches to modeling form factors in terms of quark model, pole dominance, or hybrid shapes are reviewed. It is then shown that in the combined limits of heavy quarks, chiral symmetry, and large~$\Nc$ the form factor is precisely pole-dominated. It is also shown that in a two-dimensional QCD model pole-dominance occurs for any heavy quark mass. Corrections to this limit are discussed and, to illustrate the nature of the approximations, an explicit exact calculation of the approach to the limit in a two-dimensional model is given.