Gluonic enhancements in non-spectator beauty decays—an inclusive mirage though an exclusive possibility

It has been claimed that gluon emission can raise weak annihilation contributions to heavy quark decays by powers of (m_Q/μ_had), the ratio of the heavy quark mass to a light hadron mass scale. We show that such powerlike enhancements of annihilation, interference and other preasymptotic effects do not arise for fully inclusive transitions, only for partial rates. The leading corrections are then logarithmic; even so they are crucial for determining the impact of these effects. We establish a non-trivial relation between euclidean renormalization and real decay processes in Minkowski space. Phenomenological consequences are briefly discussed, e.g. we expect the B_d and B⁻ lifetimes to differ by only a few percent with interference being the maon driving force. The (hybrid) log corrections are essential for the degree of interference by effectively cancelling non-leading terms in a 1/N_c expansion.