Review of Charm Lifetimes

Abstract

A review of the latest experimental results on charm particle lifetimes is presented. The most significant update is that the D_s^+ lifetime is conclusively larger than the D^0 lifetime and signifies that W-exchange/W-annihilation contributions are large. Using new high statistics data on $D^+\to K^+π^+π^-$ together with the D_s^+ lifetime and some assumptions, one can phenomenologically extract the strength of the W-exchange contribution in D^0 decays and of W-annihilation in D_s^+ decays. These are larger than or at the limit of theoretical expectations using QCD-based operator production expansion techniques.