Non-perturbative tests of continuum HQET through small-volume two-flavour QCD

Abstract

We study the heavy quark mass dependence of selected observables constructed from heavy-light meson correlation functions in small-volume two-flavour lattice QCD after taking the continuum limit. The light quark mass is tuned to zero, whereas the range of available heavy quark masses $m_h$ covers a region extending from around the charm to beyond the bottom quark mass scale. This allows entering the asymptotic mass-scaling regime as $1/m_h \to 0$ and performing well-controlled extrapolations to the infinite-mass limit. Our results are then compared to predictions obtained in the static limit of continuum Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET), in order to verify non-perturbatively that HQET is an effective theory of QCD. While in general we observe a nice agreement at the few-% level, we find it to be less convincing for the small-volume pseudoscalar decay constant when perturbative matching is involved.