Motivated by the claimed possibility of a large contribution of the first radial excitation of the $D^{(*)}$ to the $B$ semileptonic decay into charmed mesons, also invoked to solve the “$1/2$ vs $3/2$ semileptonic puzzle,” we discuss the transitions to heavy-light radial excitations by a heavy $b\to c$ quark current. We first consider a HQET sum rule, which provides a bound on the slopes of Isgur-Wise functions, which we then calculate in the Bakamjian-Thomas framework, which both guaranties covariance in the heavy quark limit and satisfies a set of HQET sum rules. We observe a remarkable property that for a large variety of wave functions, the transition to the first radial excitation is very small, while the transition matrix element to the second radial excitation is large and dominant in saturating the HQET sum rule. This is opposite to what is found in nonrelativistic models, where the transition to the first radial excitation dominates the sum rule. The relative magnitude of the transition to the second excitation appears to be weakly dependent on the dynamical scale (radius of the bound states), and the same holds true for the slope of the elastic transition. These features could be tested in the heavy-mass limit of lattice QCD. This pattern is shown to be related to the general structure of the Bakamjian-Thomas model; it is independent of the spin structure of the approach and derives mainly from the Lorentz transformation of the spatial wave function, a feature often disregarded in quark models.

• Received 23 May 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.036018