Heavy-quark expansion at leading power for local QCD operators in gradient flow

Gradient flow provides finite-flow-time QCD operators, whose matrix elements can be computed on the lattice and related to renormalized QCD operators through perturbative matching. We develop a matching framework that relates local flowed-QCD operators to the corresponding operators in heavy-quark effective theory (HQET) at leading power in the heavy-quark expansion. By combining the flowed-QCD-to-HQET matching relation with conventional QCD-to-HQET matching, we obtain a mass-dependent conversion relation between flowed-QCD operators and renormalized QCD operators. As a first application, we calculate the one-loop matching coefficients for heavy-light currents and derive the corresponding conversion coefficients. We find that heavy-quark mass effects in the matching and conversion coefficients can be numerically important when the flow scale is not much larger than the heavy-quark mass scale, highlighting the need for mass-dependent matching in precision lattice applications of gradient flow to heavy-quark observables.