Interference Effects, Time Reversal Violation and Search for New Physics in Hadronic Weak Decays

TL;DR

This paper introduces methods to analyze hadronic weak decays using T-odd and T-even asymmetries, enabling the detection of time reversal violation and potential new physics contributions, even after integrating over most decay angles.

Contribution

It generalizes existing techniques to extract T-violation observables from hadronic decays, including new momentum-based correlations and methods applicable to LHCb data.

Findings

Asymmetries can reveal T-violation even after integrating over angles.

Momentum correlations provide as much information as spin-based observables.

New T-violation observables are proposed for hadronic decay analysis.

Abstract

We propose some methods for studying hadronic sequential two-body decays involving more spinning particles. It relies on the analysis of T-odd and T-even asymmetries, which are related to interference terms. The latter asymmetries turn out to be as useful as the former ones in inferring time reversal violating observables; these in turn may be sensitive, under some particular conditions, to possible contributions beyond the standard model. Our main result is that one can extract such observables even after integrating the differential decay width over almost all of the available angles. Moreover we find that the correlations based exclusively on momenta are quite general, since they provide as much information as those involving one or more spins. We generalize some methods already proposed in the literature for particular decay channels, but we also pick out a new kind of time reversal violating observables. Our analysis could be applied, for example, to data of LHCb experiment.