Measurement of the form factors of the decay B^+\to\bar D^{*0}\ell^+ν_\ell and determination of the CKM matrix element |V_{cb}|

The Belle Collaboration

Published 2009-10-19Version 1

We present a measurement of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element $|V_{cb}|$ times the form factor normalization $\mathcal{F}(1)$ using the decay $B^+\to\bar D^{*0}\ell^+\nu_\ell$. This measurement is performed together with a determination of the form factor parameters $\rho^2$, $R_1(1)$ and $R_2(1)$ which fully characterize this decay in the framework of Heavy Quark Effective Theory. This analysis is based on a data sample equivalent to 140 fb$^{-1}$ of Belle data collected near the $\Upsilon(4S)$ resonance. The preliminary results, based on about 27,000 reconstructed $B^+\to\bar D^{*0}\ell^+\nu_\ell$ decays, are $\rho^2=1.376\pm 0.074\pm 0.056$, $R_1(1)=1.620\pm 0.091\pm 0.092$, $R_2(1)=0.805\pm 0.064\pm 0.036$ and $\mathcal{F}(1)|V_{cb}|=35.0\pm 0.4\pm 2.2$. We find the $B^+\to\bar D^{*0}\ell^+\nu_\ell$ branching fraction to be $(4.84\pm 0.04\pm 0.56)%$. For all numbers quoted here, the first error is the statistical and the second is the systematic uncertainty. A direct, model-independent determination of the form factor shapes has also been carried out and shows good agreement with the HQET based form factor parametrization by Caprini {\it et al.}.