CP violation difference in B o and B ± decays explained

A new experimental analysis shows the way to an explanation of the puzzling difference between the observed CP violation in neutral B decays and the failure to see it in charged B decays. Analysis of the B → Kπ data shows that the contributions of the interference between the dominant penguin diagram and the tree diagram are finite in the neutral decays but vanish in the charged decays. This explains the difference if tree-penguin interference is the source of the observed direct CP violation in the charged B decays. The suprising cancellation between the color-favored and color-suppressed amplitudes indicated by the data is not predicted by present theory, nor is any obvious difference produced by changing the flavor of the spectator quark. Isospin and Pauli effects that change with spectator quark flavor are examined and show that they can produce both the cancellation and the dependence on spectator quark flavor. ∗ e-mail: [email protected]