1 Introduction
Nonleptonic decays of the heavy mesons offer an environment to understand the nature of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Experimentally many such decays have been measured. Theoretically nonleptonic decays involve more complex mechanism than the leptonic and semileptonic ones due to the local four-quark operators. A usual treatment is the factorization approach, where the decay amplitude is factorized into the product of the meson decay constant and weak transition form factors. An intuitive justification for the factorization approximation comes from the so-called colour transparency proposed by Bjorken [
1], where for the energetic
B decay, the final light meson flies very fast in the opposite direction to the other meson, thus almost escaping the color field of the parent particle. As a result, the factorization holds. However, the strong and complicated final state interaction does challenge the factorization approximation. And this part is very hard to be quantified, therefore, in this paper we test how factorization works for the nonleptonic decays.
The form factors embodying the dynamics of the meson weak transitions are an essential input. As a motivation and also a new point of this paper, we adopt the form factors which are derived from the relativistic quark model based on the quasi-potential approach. The numerical values of form factor parameters can be found in Refs. [
2,
3], containing the results for the weak
D and
B decays to the pseudoscalar and/or vector mesons in the final states. In this relativistic quark model, the meson wave functions are explicitly obtained as numerical solutions of the relativistic Schrödinger-like bound-state equation and not assumed to be an empirical Gaussian function. Moreover, no free parameters are involved since they have been fixed by the previous studies of hadron spectroscopy. All relativistic effects including the transformation of meson wave functions from the rest reference frame to the moving one, and the contribution of intermediate negative energy states are included. It is important to note that the form factors are predicted in the whole kinematically allowed region. The values of these form factors have been well tested confronting with experiment by a series of the calculated semileptonic decay observables, e.g., the branching fractions, forward-backward asymmetries and polarizations. Similar work concerning the application of those form factors to the nonleptonic decays can be found in Refs. [
4-
6]. A very recent study of the charmless two-body
B meson decays is performed in the perturbative QCD factorization approach [
7] as a more advanced tool. See also Refs. [
8-
10] for some earlier works.
In this paper we calculate the branching fractions of the charm and bottom meson nonleptonic decays in the framework of the factorization approach based on the effective weak Hamiltonian. Experimental results from PDG and other theoretical predictions are also compiled for a direct comparison. For charm meson decays, the penguin contributions are highly suppressed, thus we neglect them. We have considered the cases of the color numbers
as in reality and
† 1) The application of large approach to the hadron physics can be seen in e.g. Refs. [11-13].
. In the latter case, the discrepancy between the theory and experimental results are expected to be significantly reduced due to the experience in 1980s [
14-
18]. For the decay process of the
B mesons, we consider both tree-level and penguin loop-level contributions. The latter can be as large as the former, or even dominant.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 and Section 3 we briefly describe the effective Hamiltonian governing the D and B weak decays. In Section 4 we collect the input values. In Section 5 we show our numerical results and discuss them. Some care should also be taken for the conventions for the definitions of the decay constants and form factors. Conclusions are given in Section 6.
2 Factorization in the charm meson two-body decays
In the standard model, the effective Hamiltonian of the weak charm meson decay process reads
where both
can be either
or
quarks,
and
is the Fermi coupling constant;
and
are color indexes;
and
are Wilson coefficients for which we use the values
[
19] at the scale
. The penguin contributions are tiny and thus can be ignored.
Using the Fierz identity ( are color indices)
with , and () being the Gell-Mann matrices, and N being the number of colors, one has
In the factorization approximation the second term of Eq. (3), which contributes to the nonfactorizable part, is neglected. Then we can write the effective Hamiltonian corresponding to the color-favored decay process
and for the color-suppressed case
with . Empirically, taking the choice of will generally improve theoretical predictions for the charm meson decays, as it was already mentioned in Introduction. In this sense, part of the nonfactorizable effects have been compensated by the choice of .
In the factorization approach, the hadronic matrix element can be expressed by the product of decay constant and the invariant form factors. The decay constant is defined as the matrix element of the weak current between the vacuum and a pseudoscalar (P) or a vector (V) meson:
where and are the decay constants of the pseudoscalar and vector meson, respectively; and are the mass and polarization vector of the vector meson.
For the transition (with the momenta and masses of the initial and final mesons, respectively), the matrix element of the weak current is parameterized as
For the transition,
In these equations, is the four-momentum transfer between the initial and final or mesons. For the case of the nonleptonic two-body decay considered below, is just the on-shell momentum of the meson created from vacuum.
The matrix element is then simplified as
where we adopt the convention where the final meson ( or ) after the comma in the subscript of is generated from vacuum.
In the rest frame of the initial meson, one has the explicit representations of the momentum and polarization vectors:
where is the energy of and , is the momentum of the daughter meson with . For convenience, we define the helicity amplitudes
with for and for .
For the process , one has
for ,
The expressions for
and
coincide with the ones given in Ref. [
20] for the
transition.
For , one has
for ,
where the definitions of
coincide with the ones given in Ref. [
20] for the
transition.
3 Factorization of the bottom meson two-body decay amplitudes
We classify the bottom meson decay channels into two classes according to the effective Hamiltonian. For transitions, e.g., the processes , , , and , the effective Hamiltonian reads
Then such category is similar to charm decays described above.
For transitions, e.g., , , and , the effective Hamiltonian reads
where ;
and is the charge of the quark.
The even operators can be rearranged to a color singlet form by the Fierz transformation
where are the Fierz coefficients that are presented in Tab.1. In this way, we have
Tab.1 The Fierz coefficients appearing in Eq. (19). |
In the above equations, and .
Here we take ( is the spectator quark), as an example, to demonstrate the calculation of the penguin contribution, with representing a charged pseudoscalar meson. The contribution of therein is proportional to and the contribution of is proportional to . The coefficient is related to the Wilson one:
The operator can be further written as
Parity conservation leads to
while equations of motion read (with being the masses of quarks )
and thus only the third term of Eq. (22) survives. Then according to Eq. (24),
and the product is given by
Therefore, the contribution of
is proportional to
. And similarly, the contribution of
is proportional to
. In Tab.2 we summarize the total penguin contributions in various processes. In our convention, the second meson (
) corresponds to the one generated from vacuum; and in the lower half of this table,
is flavor neutral. The values of Wilson coefficients at the scale
used in our calculation are
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
[
21], where
is the fine structure constant.
Tab.2 The penguin contributions to the meson two-body decays. The meson after the comma, , denotes the one produced from vaccum. When is the flavor neutral meson, the odd coefficients also contribute. They are compiled in the lower half of the table, in addition to the even part. For completeness, we also list the channels involving axial vector mesons. |
From Tab.2 one can easily read out the amplitude for a given decay process. However, some decay amplitudes contain more than one class. We take as an example. In this decay either or can be produced from vacuum. For the case when is produced from vacuum, the decay amplitude can be written as follows:
The definition of is given later in Eq. (33). For the case when is produced from vacuum, the decay amplitude reads
The total amplitude for is then given by the sum of these amplitudes
4 The input
In our consideration we use the following quark compositions of the light mesons
with
, which corresponds to the mixing angle
[
22]. Note that such value of
was previously used in Refs. [
23,
24]. This value of
agrees with the CLEO measurement
[
25] and also with the recent BESIII measurement
[
26]. Reference [
22] presents a nice analysis of the
mixing both from the theoretical and phenomenological standpoint, where in the former only the masses of pseudoscalar mesons are involved as inputs and in the latter the experimental measurements of branching fractions are used. The relation between the decay constants
and
in the singlet-octet mixing scheme and the ones
and
in the quark flavor basis
and
is given by
with
. The values of the decay constants used in our calculations [
27-
33] are as follows (in MeV)
Calculating the matrix elements of the scalar and pseudoscalar currents, one needs to use the equations of motion, Eq. (24). When
is generated from vacuum, the hadron matrix element is treated differently due to the
SU(3) breaking [
34,
35]:
with
and
. The axial-vector anomaly effect has been incorporated into this equation in order to ensure the correct behavior in the chiral limit. By using Eq. (2.12) and Eq. (2.18) from Ref. [
22], we have
Considering the fact that in the chiral limit
we arrive at Eq. (33). Note also that in the limit of
, Eq. (33) reproduces Eq. (19) of Ref. [
36].
The running quark masses at the scale
have the following values [
37]
in units of MeV. For the CKM matrix we use the Wolfenstein parameterization
with central values
,
,
and
taken from PDG [
38].
We employ the form factor values from Refs. [
2,
3] calculated in RQM, which have been well tested in the semileptonic decays. These form factors are in agreement with lattice determination, and the resulting observables (not only the branching fractions but also the forward-backward asymmetries, polarizations of the leptons or the vector mesons), agree with lattice and experimental results. As the function of momentum transfer squared, the relevant form factors are expressed by
• :
• :
For the
transition,
GeV for the form factors
, and
GeV for the form factor
. For the
transition,
GeV for the form factors
, and
GeV for the form factor
. For the
transition,
GeV for the form factors
, and
GeV for the form factor
. For the
transition,
GeV for the form factors
, and
GeV for the form factor
. The mass
is always taken as the pole mass between the active quarks:
for
transition,
for
transition,
for
transition,
for
transition. For convenience, we compile these mass parameters for the charm meson decays in Tab.3 while for the bottom meson case one refers to Tab.1 in Ref. [
3]. The values of
are easily found in Refs. [
2,
3].
Tab.3 Masses in parameterizations of the weak decay form factors of and , cf. Eqs. (38) and (39). |
Quark transition | Decay | (GeV) | (GeV) |
| | | | |
|
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
5 Results and discussion
5.1 Branching fractions
The decay branching fractions can be calculated by the equation
where for the two-body nonleptonic decays, and are the lifetime and mass of the parent particle, respectively, is the magnitude of the three-momentum of the final mesons in the rest frame of the decaying heavy meson, and expressions for the amplitudes are given in Appendices A and B. The involved expressions for are given in Eqs. (12)−(15) for , and modes, respectively. For modes, the helicities and are involved. The results for the branching fractions are shown in Tab.4 and Tab.5 for charm and bottom meson decays, respectively.
Tab.4 Branching fractions of charm meson decays compared to experimental values in PDG [38]. The results for and are shown with being the number of colors. We also list the results corresponding to “With FSI” in Ref. [39]. |
Decay channel | | | Ref. [39] | PDG [38] |
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Tab.5 Branching fractions of bottom meson decays. The results for and (with being the number of colors) are shown compared to experimental values in PDG [38]. We also show the results of Refs. [40, 47] for part of channels for which our theoretical values for deviate experimental ones by larger or around factor of 4. |
For charm meson decays, both
(the number of colors in reality) and the limit
are considered in Tab.4. As mentioned above, the case of
compensates the nonfactorizable effects to some extent and is expected to improve the theoretical predictions empirically. We confirm this point, e.g., for the channels
,
,
the results for
are altered by a factor of about 2 compared to the ones for
, improving the agreement with the experimental values. For the channels
,
,
and
, the effect is even more pronounced, the results are changed by one or two orders of magnitude compared to the ones for
bringing them closer to the measured values. In Ref. [
39], a more elaborate phenomenological analysis is performed, where the annihilation and exchange contributions as well as the resonant final-state interaction (FSI) are considered. As a result, the branching fractions for
and
as a long-standing puzzle get correctly treated in Ref. [
39] compared to the experimental values. We find in our simple treatment that only the value for the
channel agrees with the experimental value within 2 standard deviation while for the
ones the branching fractions differ from experiments by a factor of 2−3. This is in line with the observation of Ref. [
39] showing the importance of the nonfactorizable effects.
Here we discuss the rule of
in more detail. The phenomenon that this rule greatly improves predictions for branching fractions of the nonleptonic two-body
decays was realized by the community in 1980s, as shown in Refs. [
14-
16]. In Ref. [
16], Buras
et al. made a more complete analysis of charm decays, where the effectiveness of
is clearly demonstrated compared to the case of
, and also the result of the
expansion is phrased much better in terms of simple diagrammatical rules. But we stress that this rule is purely empirical. As mentioned in Ref. [
14], it is not clear whether this rule is just a coincidence or has a deeper meaning. Note that the generalization of the
to the
decays will lead to predictions in contradiction with experiment. Also, the
suppression varies in different channels and is rather of a dynamical origin.
In cases where the rule of
works well, we can understand what happens for the factorizable and nonfactorizable contributions in the spirit of the large
QCD [
16]. In the usual procedure, the
term in Eq. (21), being part of the factorizable term, is kept while the nonfactorizable term is not considered since there is no reliable way to calculate it. In such a situation the leading and nonleading
contributions mix up. The nonfactorizable one, e.g., the final state interaction effect, is nonleading in the
expansion. By dropping the
term in Eq. (21), one will work in a self-consistent expansion of
. Or we can say that the
term in factorizable part is almost compensated by the (unknown) nonfactorizable one. There is an explicit calculation to demonstrate this point [
17], where the author shows that the soft gluon exchange mechanism (a type of nonfactorizable contribution) tends to cancel the
term in the factorized amplitude by using the light cone sum rule. In a more physical picture, we can say that the quarks belonging to different color singlet currents do not easily form a meson and thus the
term is highly suppressed.
The results for the
decays are shown in Tab.5. The theoretical predictions should be better consistent with the experimental data than in the
meson case. Indeed, the factorization assumption works better for the heavier
meson since the final mesons carry larger momenta. And for some decay channels, such as
and
, the results for
perfectly match the experimental values within
uncertainty. We have calculated branching fractions for the three sets of color number
. Those results constitute a range of branching fractions varying with the choices of
, which may be understood as an error estimate in some sense. However, there is an exception, for the penguin governed decay
the result for
deviates from the one for
by two orders of magnitude. We should compare our results to the ones given in Ref. [
40] since we work in the same framework, considering the tree-level as well as penguin contributions. However, in Ref. [
40] a different set of Wilson coefficients (known as the generalized factorization) is used. Besides, we employ the form factor values predicted by our relativistic quark model, as a more advanced tool from today's perspective compared to their BSW ones. Our results for
are of similar magnitude with Ref. [
40] under the same condition
. For most of channels, our ranges of branching fractions formed by
are close to the corresponding experimental values within
uncertainty. But there are a few channels where results differ from experimental ones by larger or around factor of 5. Then we also compare with the predictions of Refs. [
40,
47], and find such deviations also happens in their results. In general, for the color-suppressed decay channels (involving
terms), such as
,
,
and
, the predicted branching fractions are lower than the experiment values. One of the reasons is due to the smallness of
, but more importantly, the strong FSI effects should play an essential role, as has been explicitly demonstrated in Ref. [
40] in detail. In fact, as we know, the interaction between pseudoscalar octet, e.g., the
system, is very strong, for which some of our recent investigations can be found in Refs. [
48-
52]. That is, the
decay will receive large contributions from the intermediate states
and
etc. On another hand, it has been found in Ref. [
53] that the spacelike penguin contributions may be sizable in
decays, where the authors showed that such corrections to the branching fraction for
may be more than 100%. However, in Ref. [
54] the authors assume that such contributions in
decays are not as severe as in
. Reference [
40] provides a careful examination but those effects of FSI and spacelike penguins can not be reliably determined yet. So conservatively speaking, the branching fraction can be trusted by its order of magnitude.
In this paragraph we give a few comments on comparison of our results with the ones in Ref. [
40] by Cheng et al. In this reference many sets of numbers for the branching fraction values are calculated, and these numbers constitute an interval. Such an interval may contain the experimental value, which is very encouraging. But in some cases their ranges span two orders of magnitude. For example, for the
decay it reads
, and for the
. Their preferred values correspond to
and
. For the same value for the color number, the differences between results of Ref. [
40] and ours mainly come from the different inputs. Especially, in Ref. [
40] complex-valued numbers for the set of the Wilson coefficients are used while we use the real-valued ones from Buchalla
et al. in Ref. [
21]. Our main goal is not to reproduce the experimental values exactly or to match them well. We want to test the factorization hypothesis by using our most recent form factor values calculated from an advanced relativistic quark model. To get a more quantitative calculation, the nonfactorizable contribution should be included anyway.
As is known and also mentioned earlier, the nonfactorizable effects may dominate in a specific decay, and there is currently no method to calculate them beforehand. However, in literature there are important works dedicated to the analysis of such nonfactorizable effects by confronting with experimental data. One typical example is the factorization-assisted topological (FAT) approach [
41-
44] which combines the naive factorization hypothesis and the topological diagram approach [
45,
46]. In these papers the authors identify the possible sources of nonfactorizable contributions and then parameterize them, in order to fit to the existing experimental data. It is found that with the inclusion of the factorization, FAT generally works better than the topological diagram approach, with less parameters and better
per degree of freedom. Specifically, in Ref. [
41] for the analysis of
decays, the authors assign a nonfactorizable term (magnitude and phase) to each of the color-suppressed,
-exchange and
-annihilation amplitudes, and the Glauber phase is additionally associated to a pion (which is important to resolve the
and
branching fraction puzzles). Then 12 parameters are used to fit 28
branching fractions and good results are achieved. For the
decays [
42], two more parameters are involved compared to the
ones, with 33 experimental numbers of branching fractions in total. Once the parameters are determined, the authors predict the CP asymmetries for
decays. The results in Ref. [
43] are very impressive. The 4 universal parameters are associated to the color-suppressed amplitude and the
-exchange amplitude, i.e., parameterizing their sizes and phases, which are used to describe the 31 decay branching fractions induced by the
transition in the
decays with
denoting a light pseudoscalar or a vector meson. If available in experiment, the predicted values are consistent with them. Then other 120 decay branching fractions are predicted. The similar analysis of the charmless two-body non-leptonic
decays
is done in Ref. [
44]. In brief, the nonfactorizable contributions require a fine analysis which is essential for a quantitative prediction of the branching fractions, and it is worth working in this direction in the future.
Here we stress again that we use the most recent form factor values. This is one of our important motivations and improvements. It is known that the form factors, which encode the underlying dynamics, play a significant role in calculations of the nonleptonic decays, as also noted in Ref. [
55]. In the earlier works [
40,
47,
55], the authors use the form factor values from the sum rule calculations, which are more appropriate for the small values of the momentum-transfer to leptons, or use the older predictions from the BSW model [
40]. In our case, the RQM includes all sources of relativistic effects, and the form factors are obtained in the whole kinematically allowed region without any extrapolations. Transitions like
and
are also considered without using the heavy quark limit.
Moreover, we have calculated as many channels as possible. Previous papers studied only some of them (although the more advanced tools in a formal perspective were used). For example, in Ref. [
56] only two decay modes are discussed. In Ref. [
55] the
,
channels are calculated, but not the
case. We have performed a complete calculation of the
,
decay to
,
and
. In this way, we could show how the form factors influence the results from a holistic point of view based on such framework. So our calculations should be, at least, a useful complement and an important update for the previous ones.
5.2 A note on the conventions for the definitions of form factors and decay constants
In some references [
57,
58], the following quark compositions for the octet mesons are used
which are different from Eq. (30) for the cases. Then the definitions of the decay constants as well as the corresponding transition form factors will change by an overall sign. Any physical result is not affected.
We have also checked different conventions on definitions of the form factors and decay constants, which differ by factors of
and/or i. Note that this detail may influence the calculation if using an inappropriate/incosistent convention. In the factorization scheme we are treating the product of
, and surely an overall sign does not matter. However, for e.g., the channel
has the subprocess
and
and thus their interference occurs. Note also the convention difference
and
, where the former is used in Refs. [
56,
59] and the latter is used in Refs. [
4,
60]. We have checked that the final results in Refs. [
35,
40,
54-
56] agree with each other just up to an overall factor of
or
, which have no influence for branching fraction of a two-body decay. As a result, the vector decay constant should be defined by
in Ref. [
4]
†2) By taking the Hermitian conjugate, one finds is equivalent to and is equivalent to .
. Then the amplitude for
follows:
It is also important to mention that all authors use real and positive form-factor and decay-constant values.
6 Conclusions
Based on the form factors computed in the relativistic quark model, we calculate the branching fraction of 100 nonleptonic decay channels of charm and bottom mesons. We provide the detailed derivation for the decay amplitudes and branching fractions. The numerical results are shown in the Section 5.
For the nonleptonic decay process of the mesons, we consider only the tree-level contributions and use the number of colors and for demonstration. Taking the value of different from 3 is a way to parametrize the nonfactorizable effects. And indeed we find that the limit works much better than other numbers of generally. Some typical examples are , , , , and .
For the nonleptonic decay process of the bottom mesons, we consider both the tree-level and penguin contributions. The results for branching fractions are in agreement with the experimental data for most of decay channels. However, for some decays, e.g.,
and
our results are too small, and as it has been demonstrated in Ref. [
40], the final-state interaction effects play an indispensable role to get the quantitatively correct values.
7 Appendix A: Decay amplitudes of the charm mesons
Here we list the amplitudes for the charm meson decays. The definition of is given in Section 2.
8 Appendix B: Decay amplitudes of the bottom mesons
As in Appendix A, here the amplitude for the bottom meson decays are provided.
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