NNLO vertex corrections in charmless hadronic B decays: Real part Original Research Article

We compute the real part of the 2-loop vertex corrections for charmless hadronic B decays, completing the NNLO calculation of the topological tree amplitudes in QCD factorization. Among the technical aspects we show that the hard-scattering kernels are free of soft and collinear infrared divergences at the 2-loop level, which follows after an intricate subtraction procedure involving evanescent four quark operators. The numerical impact of the considered corrections is found to be moderate, whereas the factorization scale dependence of the topological tree amplitudes is significantly reduced at NNLO. We in particular do not find an enhancement of the phenomenologically important ratio image from the perturbative calculation.