Evading the CKM hierarchy: Intrinsic charm in B decays

S. J. Brodsky, S. Gardner

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

We show that the presence of intrinsic charm in the hadrons' light-cone wave functions, even at a few percent level, provides new, competitive decay mechanisms for B decays which are nominally CKM suppressed. For example, the weak decays of the B-meson to two-body exclusive states consisting of strange plus light hadrons, such as B→πK, are expected to be dominated by penguin contributions since the tree-level b →suū decay is CKM suppressed. However, higher Fock states in the B wave function containing charm quark pairs can mediate the decay via a CKM-favored b→scc̄ tree-level transition. Such intrinsic charm contributions can be phenomenologically significant. Since they mimic the amplitude structure of "charming" penguin contributions, the latter need not be penguin contributions at all.

Original languageEnglish
Article number054016
JournalPhysical review D
Volume65
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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