Spectator effects in the heavy quark effective theory Original Research Article

We present a complete analysis of the Heavy Quark Effective Theory Lagrangian at order 1m2 in the leading logarithmic approximation, including effects induced by spectator quarks. At this order new correction terms appear in the effective Lagrangian, as four-quark operators containing both heavy and light quark fields. We compute the coefficients of these operators to one-loop order and in the leading logarithmic approximation. Two of them break the heavy quark spin symmetry and we estimate their contribution to the hyperfine splitting of the heavy mesons in the factorization approximation. We find that they make a positive contribution to the hyperfine splitting of about 5% of the measured splittings.