Soft-collinear effective theory and heavy-to-light currents beyond leading power

An important unresolved question in strong interaction physics concerns the parameterization of power-suppressed long-distance effects to hard processes that do not admit an operator product expansion (OPE). Recently Bauer et al. have developed an effective field theory framework that allows one to formulate the problem of soft-collinear factorization in terms of fields and operators. We extend the formulation of soft-collinear effective theory, previously worked out to leading order, to second order in a power series in the inverse of the hard scale. We give the effective Lagrangian and the expansion of "currents" that produce collinear particles in heavy quark decay. This is the first step towards a theory of power corrections to hard processes where the OPE cannot be used. We apply this framework to heavy-to-light meson transition form factors at large recoil energy. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.