We briefly discuss the predictions of the heavy quark effective theory for the semileptonic decays of a heavy pseudoscalar to a light one, or to a light vector meson. We point out that measurement of combinations of differential helicity decay rates at Cleo-c and the B factories can provide a model independent means of extracting the ratio |V_ub|/|V_cd|. We briefly discuss the corrections to this prediction.

Authors: Winston Roberts

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