Branching Fractions and Direct CP Violation in Charmless Three-body Decays of B Mesons

Understand

Charmless three-body decays of B mesons is studied using a simple model based on the framework of the factorization approach.

• Hadronic three-body decays receive both resonant and nonresonant contributions.
• Dominant nonresonant contributions to tree-dominated three-body decays arise from the $b\to u$ tree transition which can be evaluated using heavy meson chiral perturbation theory valid in the soft meson limit.
• For penguin-dominated decays, nonresonant signals come mainly from the penguin amplitude governed by the matrix elements of scalar densities $<M_1M_2|\bar q_1 q_2|0>$.