The NLO twist-3 contributions to $B \to \pi$ form factors in $k_{T}$ factorization

In this paper, we calculate the next-to-leading-order (NLO) twist-3 contribution to the form factors of $B \to \pi$ transitions by employing the $k_{T}$ factorization theorem. All the infrared divergences regulated by the logarithms $\ln(k_{iT}^{2})$ cancel between those from the quark diagrams and from the effective diagrams for the initial $B$ meson wave function and the final pion meson wave function. An infrared finite NLO hard kernel is therefore obtained, which confirms the application of the $k_{T}$ factorization theorem to $B$ meson semileptonic decays at twist-3 level. From our analytical and numerical evaluations, we find that the NLO twist-3 contributions to the form factors $f^{+,0}(q^2)$ of $B \to \pi$ transition are similar in size, but have an opposite sign with the NLO twist-2 contribution, which leads to a large cancelation between these two NLO parts. For the case of $f^+(0)$, for example, the $24\%$ NLO twist-2 enhancement to the full LO prediction is largely canceled by the negative ( about $-17\%$ ) NLO twist-3 contribution, leaving a small and stable $7\%$ enhancement to the full LO prediction in the whole range of $0\leq q^2\leq 12$ GeV$^2$. At the full NLO level, the perturbative QCD prediction is $F^{B \to \pi}(0)=0.269^{+0.054}_{-0.050}$. We also studied the possible effects on the pQCD predictions when different sets of the B meson and pion distribution amplitudes are used in the numerical evaluation.