Off-shell vertices in heavy particle effective theories and $B\rightarrow D\pi \ell \nu$

Abstract

We study the modifications to decay amplitudes in heavy to heavy semileptonic decays with multiple hadrons in the final state due to intermediate heavy hadrons being off-shell or having a finite width. Combining Heavy Hadron Chiral Perturbation Theory (HH$\chi$PT) with a BCFW on-shell factorization formula, we show that these effects induce $O(1/M)$ corrections to the standard results computed in the narrow-width approximation and therefore are important in extracting form factors from data. A combination of perturbative unitarity, analyticity, and reparameterization invariance fully determine these corrections in terms of known Isgur-Wise functions without the need to introduce new form factors. In doing so, we develop a novel technique to compute the boundary term at complex infinity in the BCFW formula for theories with derivatively coupled scalars. While we have used the $\bar B\rightarrow D\pi \ell\nu$ decay as an example, these techniques can generally be applied to effective field theories with (multiple) distinct reference vectors.