By a multitude of very important observations involving the QCD penguin, CLEO [1] has declared 1997 to be the year of the Strong Penguin. The observed size of the various modes suggest that the penguin is rather robust. The experimental observations have fueled intense theoretical activity some of which we will briefly review here. For convenience, we have divided the theoretical activity into ...

We report on recent progress in studying two aspects of B physics, in which penguin amplitudes play an important role: 1. Bounds on penguin pollution in B(t) → ππ constraining CKM parameters, and a lower bound on B → ππ improving precision in sin 2α. 2. A suggestion for measuring the photon polarization in electroweak penguin decay, B → K1(1400)γ, providing a precision test of the Standard Model.

We present results on the NLO (α2s) spectator-scattering corrections to the topological penguin amplitudes for charmless hadronic two-body B-decays in QCD factorization. The corrections can be sizable for the colour-suppressed electroweak penguin amplitudes α 4,EW but otherwise are numerically small. Our results explicitly demonstrate factorization at this order. To assess the phenomenological ...

Many animals extract, synthesize and refine chemicals for colour display, where a range of compounds and structures can produce a diverse colour palette. Feather colours, for example, span the visible spectrum and mostly result from pigments in five chemical classes (carotenoids, melanins, porphyrins, psittacofulvins and metal oxides). However, the pigment that generates the yellow colour of pe...

Using the next-to-leading order low energy effective Hamiltonian for |∆B| = 1, ∆C = ∆U = 0 transitions, the contributions of electroweak penguin operators in B−(B0 d) → PP and PV decays are estimated in the standard model. We find that, for some channels, the electroweak penguin effects can enhance or reduce the QCD penguin and/or tree level contributions by at least 30%, and can even play domi...

The color gauge-invariant transverse momentum dependent (TMD) quark correlators contain process dependent gauge links in the bilocal matrix elements. In this paper, we split these process dependent correlators into universal TMD correlators, which in turn can be parametrized in universal TMD distribution functions. The process dependence is contained in gluonic pole factors, of which the value ...

We derive the analogue of the QCD low energy theorems for the scalar and pseudoscalar gluonic correlators in nuclear matter. We find that the scalar correlations are depleted while the pseudoscalar correlations are enhanced to leading order in the nuclear matter density. We briefly discuss the consequences of these findings on the QCD spectrum.

We study the gluonic sector of the three-flavor PNJL model by obtaining the adjoint Polyakov loop and the gluon distribution function in the mean-field approximation. Besides, we explore the thermal strange quark pair-production processes, qq̄ → ss̄ and gg → ss̄, with the aid of the threeflavor PNJL model. The results help us identify the temperature where the gluonic contribution to the productio...