Off-shell vertices in heavy particle effective theories and B → Dπℓν

A bstract 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 χ PT) with a BCFW on-shell factorization formula, we show that these effects induce $$ \mathcal{O} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>O</mml:mi> </mml:math> (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 $$ \overline{B} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mover> <mml:mi>B</mml:mi> <mml:mo>¯</mml:mo> </mml:mover> </mml:math> → Dπℓν decay as an example, these techniques can generally be applied to effective field theories with (multiple) distinct reference vectors.