SU(3) symmetry breaking and CP violation in D -> PP decays

Abstract

Evidence of CP violation in the charm sector has been observed recently by the LHCb and CDF Collaborations. Adopting the topological diagram approach, we study flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking effects in the weak decay tree amplitudes of singly Cabibbo-suppressed $D\to PP$ decays. The symmetry breaking in the color-allowed and color-suppressed amplitudes is estimated with the help of the factorization ansatz, while that in the $W$-exchange amplitude is done by fitting to related branching fraction data. We find that the $W$-exchange amplitudes stay in the second quadrant relative to the color-allowed tree amplitude, albeit there are two possibilities for one type of $W$-exchange amplitude. The weak decay penguin amplitudes, on the other hand, are evaluated within the framework of QCD factorization. Using the input of topological tree amplitudes extracted from the Cabibbo-favored decay modes and the perturbative results for QCD penguin amplitudes, we make predictions for the branching fractions and CP asymmetries of singly Cabibbo-suppressed modes. The predictions of branching fractions are generally improved from those in the SU(3) limit. We conclude that the direct CP asymmetry difference between $D^0 \to K^+ K^-$ and $D^0 \to π^+ π^-$ is about $-(0.139\pm 0.004)%$ and $-(0.151\pm 0.004)%$ for the two solutions of $W$-exchange amplitudes, respectively. We also find that the CP asymmetry of $D^0\to K^0\ov K^0$ dominated by the interference between $W$-exchange amplitudes ranges from $-0.62\times 10^{-3}$ to $-1.82\times 10^{-3}$. We study phenomenological implications of two new physics scenarios for explaining the observed CP asymmetry in the charm sector, one with large penguin amplitudes and the other with a large chromomagnetic dipole operator. We find that the two scenarios can be discriminated by the measurements of CP asymmetries of a set of decay modes.