The NLO contributions to the scalar pion form factors and the ${\cal O}(α_s^2)$ annihilation corrections to the $B\to ππ$ decays

Abstract

In this paper, by employing the $k_{T}$ factorization theorem, we made the first calculation for the space-like scalar pion form factor $Q^2 F(Q^2)$ at the leading order (LO) and the next-to-leading order (NLO) level, and then found the time-like scalar pion form factor $F'^{(1)}_{\rm a,I}$ by analytic continuation from the space-like one. From the analytical evaluations and the numerical results, we found the following points: (a) the NLO correction to the space-like scalar pion form factor has an opposite sign with the LO one but is very small in magnitude, can produce at most $10\%$ decrease to LO result in the considered $Q^2$ region; (b) the NLO time-like scalar pion form factor $F'^{(1)}_{\rm a,I}$ describes the ${\cal O}(α_s^2)$ contribution to the factorizable annihilation diagrams of the considered $B \to ππ$ decays, i.e. the NLO annihilation correction; (c) the NLO part of the form factor $F'^{(1)}_{\rm a,I}$ is very small in size, and is almost independent with the variation of cutoff scale $μ_0$, but this form factor has a large strong phase around $-55^\circ$ and may play an important role in producing large CP violation for $B\to ππ$ decays; and (d) for $B^0 \to π^+π^-$ and $ π^0π^0$ decays, the newly known NLO annihilation correction can produce only a very small enhancement to their branching ratios, less than $3\%$ in magnitude, and therefore we could not interpret the well-known $ππ$-puzzle by the inclusion of this NLO correction to the factorizable annihilation diagrams.