Radiative and leptonic decays of B-mesons represent an excellent laboratory for the search for New Physics. I present here recent results on radiative and leptonic decays from the Belle and BABAR collaborations.
High Luminosity upgrades of the KEK-B collider are being discussed. We consider the role of the purely leptonic decays B^pm -> l^pm nu and B^0 -> l+l- in motivating such an upgrade. These decays are very sensitive to R parity violating extensions of the MSSM, and we show that future runs of the KEK-B factory can be competitive with high energy colliders for probing such models.
We review recent experimental progress in the domain of rare radiative, semileptonic and leptonic B decays. The statistical precision attained for these decays has reached a level where they start to impose meaningful constraints on the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, which are complementary to those obtained from hadronic decays. While the current data indicate no deviations from Standard Model predictions, there is still some room for new physics in these decays.
We study transition form factors for radiative and rare semi-leptonic B-meson decays into light pseudoscalar or vector mesons, combining theoretical constraints and phenomenological information from Lattice QCD, light-cone sum rules, and dispersive bounds. We pay particular attention to form factor parameterisations which are based on the so-called series expansion, and study the related systematic uncertainties on a quantitative level. In this context, we also provide the NLO corrections to the correlation function between two flavour-changing tensor currents, which enters the unitarity constraints for the coefficients in the series expansion.