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Evading the CKM Hierarchy: Intrinsic Charm in B Decays

S. J. Brodsky·S. Gardner
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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\toπK, are expected to be dominated by penguin contributions since the tree-level b\to s u\bar u 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\to s c\bar c tree-level transition. Such intrinsic charm contributions can be phenomenologically significant. Since they mimic the amplitude structure of ``charming'' penguin contributions, charming penguins need not be penguins at all.

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S. J. Brodsky, S. Gardner. 2001-11-20. Evading the CKM Hierarchy: Intrinsic Charm in B Decays. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.65.054016

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