Z′ mediated flavor changing neutral currents in B meson decays

Abstract

We study the effects of an extra U(1)′ gauge boson with flavor changing couplings with fermion mass eigenstates on certain B meson decays that are sensitive to such new physics contributions. In particular, we examine to what extent the current data on Bd→φK and Bd→η′K decays may be explained in such models, concentrating on the example in which the flavor changing couplings are left-chiral. We find that within reasonable ranges of parameters, the Z′ contribution can readily account for the anomaly in SφKS but is not sufficient to explain large branching ratio of Bd→η′K with the same parameter value. SφKS and Sη′KS are seen to be the dominant observables that constrain the extra weak phase in the model.