Observation of the Rare Decay B+ -> K+ pi0 pi0

TL;DR

This paper reports the first observation of the rare decay B+ -> K+ pi0 pi0, measuring its branching fraction with high statistical significance using data from the BaBar detector.

Contribution

The study provides the first measurement of the branching fraction for B+ -> K+ pi0 pi0 decay, demonstrating the decay's occurrence with high confidence.

Findings

Branching fraction measured as (15.5 +/- 1.1 +/- 1.6) x 10^(-6).

Decay observed with over 10 sigma significance.

Analysis used 470.9 million BBbar events.

Abstract

We report an analysis of charmless hadronic decays of charged B mesons to the final state K+ pi0 pi0, using a data sample of 470.9 +/- 2.8 million BBbar events collected with the BaBar detector at the Upsilon(4S) resonance. We observe an excess of signal events with a significance above 10 standard deviations including systematic uncertainties and measure the branching fraction to be BF(B+ -> K+ pi0 pi0) = (15.5 +/- 1.1 +/- 1.6) x 10^(-6), where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively.