Accurate measurement of the D0-D0bar mixing parameters

Abstract

We propose a new method to determine the mass and width differences of the two D meson mass-eigenstates as well as the CP violating parameters associated with D^0-\bar{D}^0 mixing. We show that an accurate measurement of all the mixing parameters is possible for an arbitrary CP violating phase, by combining observables from a time dependent study of D decays to a doubly Cabibbo suppressed mode with information from a CP eigenstate. As an example we consider D^0-> K^{*0} \pi^0 decays where the K^{*0} is reconstructed in both K^+\pi^- and K_S\pi^0. We also show that decays to the CP eigenstate D-> K^+K^- together with D-> K^+\pi^- can be used to extract all the mixing parameters. A combined analysis using D^0-> K^{*0} \pi^0 and D-> K^+K^- can also be used to reduce the ambiguity in the determination of parameters.