First observation of five charmless hadronic B decays

There has been much progress in measurements of charmless hadronic B decays during 1997. Building on the previous indications from CLEO and LEP, CLEO now has clear signals in five exclusive final states: K + π − , K 0 π + , η ′ K + , η ′ K 0 , and ωK +. The branching fractions for the η ′ K modes are several times larger than the others. A similar strikingly large signal has been seen in the inclusive decay, B → η ′ X S. All of these signals would appear to be dominated by hadronic penguin processes.