CP Violation and Strong Phases from Penguins in $\bf B^{\pm}\rightarrow VV$ Decays

Abstract

We calculate direct CP-violating observables in charged $B\to VV$ decays arising from the interference of amplitudes with different strong and CKM phases. The perturbative strong phases develop at order $\alpha_s$ from absorptive parts of one-loop matrix elements of the next-to-leading logarithm corrected effective Hamiltonian. CPT constraints are maintained. Based on this model, we find that partial rate asymmetries between charge conjugate $B^{\pm}$ decays can be as high as 15-30\% for certain channels with branching ratios in the $10^{-6}$ range. The small values of the coefficients of angular correlations, which we calculated previously to be of order $10^{-2}$, are not significantly degraded by the strong phases. The charge asymmetries of rates and angular distributions would provide unambiguous evidence for direct CP violation.