The virtual contributions from $K^*$ in the $B \to K^*\pi h$ and $B \to K\rho h$ decays

Abstract

Inspired by the significant virtual contributions of the subprocesses $D^{*}/B^{*}\to D\pi$ and $ \rho\to\omega \pi/K\bar{K}$ in the three-body hadronic $B$ meson decays, we study the off-shell effects of the resonance $K^*$ decaying into the $K^*\pi$ or $K\rho$ system in the decays $B \to K^*\pi h$ and $B \to K\rho h$ (with $h=\pi, K$) within the perturbative QCD approach. The strong coupling constants $g_{K^*K^*\pi}$ and $g_{K^*K\rho}$ involved in this work are derived from the coupling constant $g_{\rho\omega\pi}$ under the flavor SU$(3)$ symmetry. The $CP$ averaged branching fractions for the quasi-two-body decays $B\to K^*[\to K^*\pi] h$ and $B\to K^*[\to K\rho] h$ are predicted to be on the order of $10^{-9}$ to $10^{-7}$ in this study. And the branching fractions for the decays $B\to K^*[\to K\rho] h$ are found to be around half of the corresponding results for the $B\to K^*[\to K^*\pi] h$ channels, mainly due to the phase space difference between the $K\rho$ and $K^*\pi$ pairs originating from the intermediate state $K^*$. Experimental data for the $K^*$ decaying into the final states $K^*\pi$ and $K\rho$ in the $B$ meson decays is expected to be obtained by the LHCb and Belle-II experiments in the near future.