The Semileptonic Decay Fraction of B Mesons in the Light of Interfering Amplitudes

Abstract

Consequences of the interference between spectator amplitudes for the lifetimes and semileptonic decay fractions of B^0 and B^+ mesons are discussed. Assuming duality and constructive interference between spectator amplitudes we are able to explain the low experimental value for the semileptonic decay fraction of $B$ mesons. Extracting these amplitudes from a fit to 11 exclusive hadronic B decay fractions we find a_1 = 1.05 +/- 0.03 +/- 0.10, a_2 =+0.227 +/ 0.012 +/- 0.022, an inclusive semileptonic decay fraction of (11.2 +/- 0.5 +/- 1.7), and a lifetime ratio tau(B^+) / tau(B^0) = 0.83 +/- 0.01 +/- 0.01.

9 pages

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Extraction of $a_1$ and $a_2$ from $B\to \psi K(K^{\ast }),D(D^{\ast })\pi (\rho )$ Decays
• Measurement of Branching Fractions of Color-Suppressed Decays of the B0bar Meson to D(*)0 pi0, D(*)0 eta, D(*)0 omega, and D0 eta_prime
• Measurement of Bose-Einstein Correlations in e+e- -> W+W- at root(s)=189GeV
• Branching Fraction Measurements of the Color-Suppressed Decays B0bar to D(*)0 pi0, D(*)0 eta, D(*)0 omega, and D(*)0 eta_prime and Measurement of the Polarization in the Decay B0bar to D*0 omega