Right handed currents and FSI phases in B^0 --> \phi K^{*0}

Abstract

We consider possible effects of New Physics (NP) on the angular distributions of the decay B^0 --> \phi K^{*0}, showing how these effects depend on the nature of nonstandard interactions. In a general framework based on factorization, we show that triple products can be used to probe the chirality of NP currents. In this analysis we take into account the presence of non-vanishing strong phases, which is motivated by recent experimental evidence. It is seen that the observability of right-handed NP is strongly dependent on the relation between the relative magnitude of these phases and the ratio of Standard Model and NP scales. As an application we estimate the expected values of relevant observables in a particular Left Right Symmetric Model.