Rare decays of heavy-flavoured particles provide an ideal laboratory to look for deviations from the Standard Model, and explore energy regimes beyond the LHC reach. Decays proceeding via electroweak penguin diagrams are excellent probes to search for New Physics, and b→ s`+`− processes are particularly interesting since they give access to many observables such as branching fractions, asymmetr...

and Λb → pK − (CDF). Also examined are branching-fraction measurements or limits for the B0 s → D (∗) s D (∗) s modes (Belle, CDF, and DZero), the B0 s → γ γ radiative penguin decay (Belle), and three two-body charmless B0 s meson decay channels (CDF). Implications for the phenomenology of electroweak and QCD physics, as well as searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, are identified whe...

I briefly review CP violation in the B system, concentrating on B → πK decays. I discuss how to deal with electroweak-penguin contributions to these decays using flavour SU(3). With these, I show that the entire unitarity triangle can be extracted from measurements of B → πK decays. Finally, I examine the signals for new physics in these decays and the possibilities for measuring them. talk giv...

The role of B decays in the study of CP violation is reviewed. We treat the interactions and spectroscopy of the b quark and then introduce CP violation in B meson decays, including time-dependences, decays to CP eigenstates and non-eigenstates, and flavor tagging. Additional topics include studies of strange B’s, decays to pairs of light pseudoscalar mesons, and the roles of gluonic and electr...

A useful inequality is obtained if charmless strange B decays are assumed to be dominated by a ∆I = 0 transition like that from the gluonic penguin diagram and the contributions of all other diagrams including the tree, electroweak penguin and annihilation diagrams are small but not negligible. The interference contributions which are linear in these other amplitudes are included but the direct...

Motivated by the recent experimental data, we have revisited the B → πK, ππ decays in the framework of QCD factorization, with inclusion of the important strong penguin corrections of order αs induced by b → Dg∗g∗ (D = d or s) transitions. We find that these higher order strong penguin contributions can provide∼ 30% enhancement to the penguindominated B → πK decay rates, and such an enhancement...

We derive constraints for B → V V modes (V = vector meson) that allow a quantitative assessment of the contributions from electroweak penguins (EWP) and/or new physics. Interplay of direct CP with oscillation studies then leads to the extraction of the angles α and γ, using B → Kω(ρ) andB → ρω(φ) respectively, if by using our constraint equations it can be experimentally demonstrated that color...

The low energy effective Hamiltonian of the standard model includes ∆S = 1 four-fermion operators with corresponding Wilson coefficients, which contains all the short-distance physics. The low energy effects of the electroweak and strong interactions can be expressed in terms of matrix elements of the four-fermion operators between hadronic states. Lattice QCD is wellsuited to calculate these m...

We present a method to measure the CKM phase α and the tree and penguin (strong and electroweak) amplitudes in B → ππ decays, based on isospin consideration and the weak assumption that all tree amplitudes have a common strong phase and all penguin amplitudes have a different common phase. The method needs only the time-independent measurements of the relevant decay rates in B → ππ. We also pro...

Based upon flavor SU(3) symmetry, we perform global fits to charmless B decays into one pseudoscalar meson and one vector meson in the final states. We consider different symmetry breaking schemes and find that the one implied by näıve factorization is slightly favored over the exact symmetry case. The (ρ̄, η̄) vertex of the unitarity triangle (UT) constrained by our fits is consistent with other...