Global analysis of charmless B decays into two vector mesons in soft-collinear effective theory

Abstract

Under the framework of soft-collinear effective theory, we analyze the charmless $B\to VV$ decays in a global way at leading power in $1/m_b$ and leading order in $\alpha_s$ with $V$ denoting a light vector meson. In the flavor SU(3) symmetry, decay amplitudes for the 28 decay modes are expressed in terms of 8 nonperturbative parameters. With 35 experimental results, we fit these 8 nonperturbative parameters. Annihilation contributions are neglected due to power suppression in the $m_b\to \infty$ limit, so we include in the fit the nonperturbative charm penguins, which will play an important role in understanding the direct CP asymmetries. Charming penguins are also responsible for the large transverse polarizations of penguin-dominated and color-suppressed decays. With the best fitted parameters, we calculate all possible physical observables of 28 decay modes, including branching fractions, direct CP asymmetries, and the complete set of polarization observables. Most of our results are compatible with the present experimental data when available, while the others can be examined on the ongoing LHCb experiment and the forthcoming Belle-II experiment. Moreover, the agreements and differences with results in QCD factorization and perturbative QCD approach are also discussed. A few observables are suggested to discriminate these different approaches.