Improving Extractions of |vcb| and the B Quark Mass from Semileptonic Inclusive B Decay

Inclusive semileptonic B → Xc l ν̄ decay offers the opportunity to measure the CKM parameter |Vcb| and the bottom quark mass from experiment. . Experimental studies of moments of the differential decay spectra of B → Xc l ν̄ , combined with a measurement of the total inclusive decay rate, allow the extraction of these parameters to occur with high precision. The idea is that sufficiently inclusive observables of this decay can be calculated without model dependence from QCD using an operator product expansion (OPE). The OPE demonstrates that in the mb ≫ ΛQCD limit inclusive B decay rates are equal to inclusive b quark decay rates. Corrections to this rate are suppressed by powers of the ratio ΛQCD/mb and αs. The terms in the ΛQCD/mb expansion are parameterized using heavy quark effective theory (HQET) with two parameters introduced for corrections at O (