Axial couplings in heavy-hadron chiral perturbation theory at the next-to-leading order

We present calculations of axial-current matrix elements between various heavy-meson and heavy-baryon states to the next-to-leading order in heavy-hadron chiral perturbation theory in the p-regime. When compared with data from lattice computations or experiments, these results can be used to determine the axial couplings in the chiral Lagrangian. Our calculation is performed in partially quenched chiral perturbation theory for both SU(4|2) and SU(6|3). We incorporate finite-size effects arising from a single Goldstone meson wrapping around the spatial volume. Results for full QCD with two and three flavors can be obtained straightforwardly by taking the sea-quark masses to be equal to the valence-quark masses. To illustrate the impact of our chiral perturbation theory calculation on lattice computations, we analyze the SU(2) full-QCD results in detail. We also study one-loop contributions relevant to the heavy-hadron strong-decay amplitudes involving final-state Goldstone bosons, and demonstrate that the quark-mass dependence of these amplitudes can be significantly different from that of the axial-current matrix elements containing only single-hadron external states.