Instanton Contribution to $B \rightarrow X_u e \bar \nu $ Decay

Abstract

We study instanton effects on inclusive semileptonic $b \rightarrow u$ decay using the heavy quark effective field theory and the operator product expansion. The effect contributes not only to the hadronic matrix element but also to the coefficient functions in the operator product expansion. We find that the coefficient function is singular near the boundaries of the phase space. In order to use perturbative QCD reliably, it is necessary to introduce smearing near the boundary. However the instanton contribution to $b \rightarrow c$ decay seems negligibly small.