Soft-collinear factorization in B decays

The combination of collinear factorization with effective field theory originally developed for soft interactions of heavy quarks provides the foundations of the theory of exclusive and semi-inclusive B decays. In this article I summarize some of the later conceptual developments of the so-called QCD factorization approach that make use of soft-collinear effective theory. Then I discuss the status and results of the calculation of the hard-scattering functions at the next order, and review very briefly some of the phenomenology, covering aspects of charmless, electroweak penguin and radiative (semi-leptonic) decays.
Comment: 27 pages, LaTeX, 10 figures, to appear in Nucl. Phys. (Proc. Suppl.) ,"Advances in Computational Particle Physics", Proceedings of the Final Meeting of the Collaborative Research Centre / Transregio 9 "Computational Particle Physics", Durbach, Germany, September 2014