Resonances gone topsy turvy - the charm of QCD or new physics in $b \to s \ell^+ \ell^-$?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes charm-resonance interference effects in B meson decays, revealing significant non-factorisable corrections and challenging the interpretation of anomalies as new physics, thus emphasizing the importance of QCD effects in flavor physics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed non-perturbative analysis of charm-resonance effects in B decays, questioning the standard factorisation approximation and its implications for new physics interpretations.

Findings

Observed interference pattern differs from factorisation approximation predictions.

Large non-factorisable corrections are needed to match experimental data.

Charm-resonance effects can explain B decay anomalies without invoking new physics.

Abstract

We investigate the interference pattern of the charm-resonances $\Psi(3370,4040,4160,4415)$ with the electroweak penguin operator $O_9$ in the branching fraction of $B^+\to K^+\mu\mu$. For this purpose we extract the charm vacuum polarisation via a standard dispersion relation from BESII-data on $e^+e^-\to hadrons$. In the factorisation approximation (FA) the vacuum polarisation describes the interference fully non-perturbatively. The observed interference pattern by the LHCb collaboration is opposite in sign and and significantly enhanced as compared to the FA. A change of the FA-result by a factor of -2.5, which correspond to a 350%-corrections, results in a reasonable agreement with the data. This raises the question on the size of non-factorisable corrections which are colour enhanced but loop-suppressed. In the parton picture it is found that the corrections are of relative size ~-0.5 when averaged over the open charm-region which is far below -3.5 needed to explain the observed effect. We present combined fits to the BESII- and the LHCb-data, testing for effects beyond the Standard Model (SM)-FA. We cannot find any significant evidence of the parton estimate being too small due to cancellations between the individual resonances. It seems difficult to accommodate the LHCb-result in the standard treatment of the SM or QCD respectively. In the SM the effect can be described in a $q^2$-dependent shift of the Wilson coefficient combination $C^{eff}_9 + C^{' eff}_9$. We devise strategies to investigate the microscopic structure in future measurements. We show that the charm-resonance effects can accommodate the $B \to K^* ll$-anomalies (e.g. $P_5'$). Hence our findings indicate that the interpretation of the anomaly through a $Z'$-boson, mediating between $bs$ and $ll$ fields, is disfavoured. More generally our results motivate investigations into $b \to s\bar cc$-physics.