Helicity conservation and factorization-suppressed charmless B decays

Abstract

Toward the goal of extracting the weak angle alpha, the decay B^0/B^0-bar to a_0^{+/-}pi^{-/+} was recently measured. The decay B^0 to a_0^+pi^- is not only forbidden in the factorization limit of the tree interaction, but also strongly suppressed for the penguin interaction if short-distance QCD dominates. This makes extraction of alpha very difficult from a^{+/-}π^{-/+}. We examine the simlar factorization-suppressed decays, in particular, B^0\to b_1^+pi^-. The prospect of obtaining alpha is even less promising with b_1^{+/-}pi^{-/+}. To probe how well the short-distance dominance works, we emphasize importance of testing helicity conservation in the charmless B decays with spins.