CKM Favored Semileptonic Decays of Heavy Hadrons at Zero Recoil

We study the properties of Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) favored semileptonic decays of mesons and baryons containing a heavy quark at the point of no recoil. We first use a diagrammatic analysis to rederive the result observed by earlier authors that at this kinematic point the $B$ meson decays via $b\to c$ transitions can only produce a $D$ or $D^*$ meson. The result is generalized to include photon emissions which violate heavy quark flavor symmetry. We show that photons emitted by the heavy quarks and the charged lepton are the only light particles that can decorate the decays $\bar{B}\to D(D^*) + \ell\nu$ at zero recoil, and the similar processes of heavy baryons. Implications for the determinations of the CKM parameter $V_{cb}$ are discussed. Also studied in this paper is the connection between our diagrammatic analysis of suppression of particle emission and the formal observation based on weak currents at zero recoil being generators of heavy quark symmetry. We show that the two approaches can be unified by considering the Isgur-Wise function in the presence of an external source.

Comment: 27 pages, including 11 figures using macros FEYNMAN.tex