Evading the CKM Hierarchy [report]

Stanley J Brodsky
2001 unpublished
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 → suu decay is CKM suppressed. However, higher Fock states in the B wave function
more » ... ontaining charm quark pairs can mediate the decay via a CKM-favored b → scc 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.
doi:10.2172/787219 fatcat:y2suater5fhdbddkfxjmlnn2wi