Heavy-Light Meson Decay Constant from QCD Sum Rules in Three-Loop Approximation

In this paper we compute the decay constant of the pseudo-scalar heavy-light mesons in the heavy quark effective theory framework of QCD sum rules. In our analysis we include the recently evaluated three-loop result of order $\alpha_s^2$ for the heavy-light current correlator. The value of the bottom quark mass, which essentially limits the accuracy of the sum rules for $B$ meson, is extracted from the nonrelativistic sum rules for $\Upsilon$ resonances in the next-to-next-to-leading approximation. We find stability of our result with respect to all types of corrections and the specific form of the sum rule which reduces the uncertainty. Our results $f_B=206\pm 20$ MeV and $f_D=195\pm 20$ MeV for the $B$ and $D$ meson decay constants are in impressive agreement with recent lattice calculations.