Matrix Elements of Electroweak Penguin Operators in the 1/Nc Expansion

Abstract

It is shown that the K -> pi pi matrix elements of the four-quark operator Q_7, generated by the electroweak penguin-like diagrams of the Standard Model, can be calculated to first non-trivial order in the chiral expansion and in the 1/Nc expansion. Although the resulting B factors B_7^(1/2) and B_7^(3/2) are found to depend only logarithmically on the matching scale, mu, their actual numerical values turn out to be rather sensitive to the precise choice of mu in the GeV region. We compare our results to recent numerical evaluations from lattice-QCD and to other model estimates.