We revisit QCD calculations of radiative heavy meson decay form factors by including the subleading power corrections from the twist-two photon distribution amplitude at next-to-leading-order in $alpha_s$ with the method of the light-cone sum rules (LCSR). The desired hard-collinear factorization formula for the vacuum-to-photon correlation function with the interpolating currents for two heavy mesons is constructed with the operator-product-expansion technique in the presence of evanescent operators. Applying the background field approach, the higher twist corrections from both the two-particle and three-particle photon distribution amplitudes are further computed in the LCSR framework at leading-order in QCD, up to the twist-four accuracy. Combining the leading power point-like photon contribution at tree level and the subleading power resolved photon corrections from the newly derived LCSR, we update theory predictions for the nonperturbative couplings describing the electromagnetic decay processes of the heavy mesons $H^{ast , pm} to H^{pm} , gamma$, $H^{ast , 0} to H^{0} , gamma$, $H_s^{ast , pm} to H_s^{pm} , gamma$ (with $H=D, , B$). Furthermore, we perform an exploratory comparisons of our sum rule computations of the heavy-meson magnetic couplings with the previous determinations based upon different QCD approaches and phenomenological models.
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