Evading the CKM Hierarchy: Intrinsic Charm in B Decays

Abstract

We show that the presence of intrinsic charm in the hadrons' light-cone wave functions, even at a few percent level, provides new, competitive decay mechanisms for B decays which are nominally CKM-suppressed. For example, the weak decays of the B-meson to two-body exclusive states consisting of strange plus light hadrons, such as B\to\pi K, are expected to be dominated by penguin contributions since the tree-level b\to s u\bar u decay is CKM suppressed. However, higher Fock states in the B wave function containing charm quark pairs can mediate the decay via a CKM-favored b\to s c\bar c tree-level transition. Such intrinsic charm contributions can be phenomenologically significant. Since they mimic the amplitude structure of ``charming'' penguin contributions, charming penguins need not be penguins at all.