Decay Constants of Heavy Pseudoscalar Mesons: Reconciling QCD Sum Rules and Lattice QCD

Exploiting recently proposed novel improvements of the techniques used for extracting from QCD sum rules pivotal hadron characteristics, including their systematic errors, we succeed to achieve a conspicuous agreement of the predictions of QCD sum rules for the decay constants $f_B$ and $f_{B_s}$ of the heavy pseudoscalar mesons $B$ and $B_s,$ which before tended to be slightly too large, with corresponding results from lattice QCD. Adopting for the crucial $b$-quark $\bar{\rm MS}$ mass the value $\bar{m}_b(\bar{m}_b)=(4.247\pm0.034)$ GeV, we get $f_B=(192.0\pm14.6)$ MeV and $f_{B_s}=(228.0\pm19.8)$ MeV; clearly, this may be also viewed as a determination of the $b$-quark mass from sufficiently precise decay constants.