In the present thesis I discuss the hard spectator interaction
amplitude in B to pi pi at NLO i.e. at O(\alpha_s^2).
This special part of
the amplitude, whose LO starts at O(alpha_s), is defined in
the framework of QCD factorization. QCD factorization allows to separate the
short- and the long-distance physics in leading power in an expansion
in Lambda/m_b, where the short-distance physics can be
calculated in a perturbative expansion in alpha_s. Compared to
other parts of the amplitude hard
spectator interactions are formally enhanced by the hard collinear
scale sqrt{Lambda m_b}, which occurs next to the m_b-scale and
leads to an enhancement of alpha_s.
From a technical point of view the main challenges of this calculation
are due to the fact that we have to deal with Feynman
integrals that come with up to five external legs and with three
independent ratios of scales. These Feynman integrals have to be
expanded in powers of Lambda/m_b.
I will discuss integration by parts identities to reduce the
number of master integrals and differential equations techniques to
get their power expansions. A concrete implementation of integration by
parts identities in a computer algebra system is given in the
appendix.
Finally I discuss numerical issues like scale dependence of the
amplitudes and branching ratios. It will turn out that the NLO
contributions of the hard spectator interactions are important but
small enough for perturbation theory to be valid.