Inclusive decays of B mesons into Ds and Ds at O(αs) including Ds* polarization effects

The dominant contribution to the inclusive decays of B mesons into the charm-strangeness mesons D-s and D-s* is expected to be given by the partonic process b --> c + (D-s(-) ,D-s*(-)). We determine the nonperturbative O(1/m(b)(2)) and the O(alpha(s)) radiative corrections to b --> c + (D-s(-), D-s*(-)) and thereby to the inclusive decays (B) over bar --> X-c + (D-s(-),D-s*(-)). The new feature of our calculation is that we separately determine the nonperturbative and the O(alpha(s)) corrections to the longitudinal (L) and transverse (T) pieces of the spin 1 D-s*(-) meson. The longitudinal/transverse composition of the D-s*(-) can be probed through its two principal decay modes D-s*(-)--> D-s(-) + gamma and D-s*(-)--> D-s(-) + pi(0) for which we write down the angular decay distributions. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.