Improved analysis of the (O₇, O₇) contribution to bar{B} rightarrow X_s γ γ at O(α_s)

The present study is devoted for an improved analysis of the self-interference contribution of the electromagnetic dipole operator O_7 to the double differential decay width $d\Gamma/(ds_1 ds_2)$ for the inclusive $\bar{B} \to X_s \gamma \gamma$ process, where the kinematical variables s_1 and s_2 are defined as s_i=(p_b - q_i)^2/m_b^2 with p_b, q_1, q_2 being the momenta of the b-quark and two photons. This calculation completes the NLL QCD prediction of the numerically important self-interference contribution of O_7 by keeping the full dependence on the strange-quark mass m_s, which is introduced to control possible collinear configurations of one of the photons with the strange quark. Our results are given for exact m_s, in contrast to an earlier work where only logarithmic and constant terms in m_s were retained. This improved NLL result for the (O_7, O_7)-interference contribution shows that finite m_s effects are only sizable near the kinematical endpoints of the spectrum $d\Gamma/(ds_1 ds_2)$. At the level of the branching ratio, in the phase-space region considered in this paper, it is observed that $Br[\bar{B} \to X_s \gamma \gamma]$ does not develop a sizable m_s dependence: the impact on this branching ratio is less than 5% when m_s is varied between 400-600 MeV. For the same phase-space region finite strange quark mass effects for the branching ratio are less than 7%.