A General Lower Bound for Radiative B Decay

Abstract

In a wide class of models -- including the standard model -- flavor-changing neutral currents are suppressed by an approximate chiral symmetry of the low-energy lagrangian. This symmetry allows the derivation of general relations among low-energy flavour-changing processes. We derive one such: the relative sizes of the decay rates b --> s gamma, b --> d gamma and s --> d gamma. Together with a unitarity-related lower bound on the rate for the strangeness-changing hyperon decay Omega^- --> Xi^- \gamma we obtain a reasonably model-independent lower bound for the inclusive b --> s gamma rate.