Final-state interactions in the CP asymmetries of charm-meson two-body decays

TL;DR

This paper develops a dispersive approach to estimate strong phases in charm-meson decays, aiming to explain CP violation measurements, but finds the Standard Model predictions are significantly lower than observed.

Contribution

It introduces a two-channel coupled dispersion relation method incorporating experimental phase-shifts to compute rescattering effects in charm decays, improving theoretical estimates of CP asymmetries.

Findings

Predicted CP violation levels are much lower than experimental measurements.

Rescattering effects significantly influence strong phases in decay amplitudes.

The approach constrains non-perturbative inputs using experimental branching ratios.

Abstract

Urgent theoretical progress is needed in order to provide an estimate in the Standard Model of the recent measurement by LHCb of direct CP violation in charm-meson two-body decays. Rescattering effects must be taken into account for a meaningful theoretical description of the amplitudes involved in such category of observables, as signaled by the presence of large strong phases. We discuss the computation of the latter effects based on a two-channel coupled dispersion relation, which exploits isospin-zero phase-shifts and inelasticity parameterizations of data coming from the rescattering processes $ \pi \pi \to \pi \pi $, $ \pi K \to \pi K $, and $ \pi \pi \to K \overline{K} $. The determination of the subtraction constants of the dispersive integrals relies on the leading contributions to the transition amplitudes from the $ 1/N_C $ counting, where $N_C$ is the number of QCD colours. Furthermore, we use the measured values of the branching ratios to help in selecting the non-perturbative inputs in the isospin limit, from which we predict values for the CP asymmetries. We find that the predicted level of CP violation is much below the experimental value.