PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF QCD FACTORIZATION TO SEMI-INCLUSIVE B DECAYS

We have systematically investigated the semi-inclusive B decays B → MX, which are manifestations of the quark decay b → Mq, within a framework inspired by QCD-improved factorization. These decays are theoretically clean and have distinctive experimental signatures. We focus on a class of these that do not require any form factor information and therefore may be especially suitable for extracting information on the angles α and γ of the unitarity triangle. The strong phase coming from final-state rescattering due to hard gluon exchange between the final states can induce large rate asymmetries for tree-dominated color-suppressed modes . The nonfactorizable hard spectator interactions in the 3-body decay , though phase-space suppressed, are extremely important for the tree-dominated modes , φX, J/ψX_s, J/ψX and the penguin-dominated mode . Our result for is in agreement with experiment. , , and B⁻ → (K⁰X_s, K^*0X_s) are the most promising ones in searching for direct CP violation: they have branching ratios of order 10⁻⁶ – 10⁻⁴ and CP rate asymmetries of order (10 – 40)%.