Charmless Hadronic B Decays at BABAR

TL;DR

This paper reports on searches for rare charmless hadronic B meson decays using BABAR data, measuring branching fractions for several decay modes and setting upper limits where signals are not significant.

Contribution

First measurements of branching fractions for multiple charmless hadronic B decay modes using BABAR data, providing new experimental results in B physics.

Findings

Measured branching fractions for B^0 --> pi^+pi^-, K^+pi^-, rho^-pi^+ and B^+ --> eta^' K^+.

Set upper limits for decay modes without significant signals.

Analyzed 8.8 million B-anti-B decays at BABAR.

Abstract

We present preliminary results of several searches for rare charmless hadronic decays of the B meson using data collected by the BABAR detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's PEP-II storage ring. We search for the decays h^+h^-, h^+h^-h^+, h^+h^-pi^0, X^0h^+, and X^0 K_S^0, where h = pi or K, and X^0 = eta^prime or omega. In a sample of 8.8 million B-anti-B decays we measure the branching fractions: BF(B^0 --> pi^+pi^-) = (9.3^{+2.6}_{-2.3}^{+1.2}_{-1.4}) x 10^{-6}, BF(B^0 --> K^+pi^-) = (12.5^{+3.0}_{-2.6}^{+1.3}_{-1.7}) x 10^{-6}, BF(B^0 --> rho^-pi^+) = (49 +/- 13^{+6}_{-5}) x 10^{-6}$, and BF(B^+ --> eta^prime K^+) = (62 +/- 18 +/- 8) x 10^{-6}$. We calculate upper limits for the modes without a significant signal.