Impact of D0-D0bar mixing on the experimental determination of gamma

TL;DR

This paper examines how D0-D0bar mixing can influence the measurement of the weak phase gamma in B meson decays, highlighting the importance of accounting for mixing effects to avoid biases in new physics searches.

Contribution

It demonstrates that D0-D0bar mixing parameters can significantly affect gamma measurements and provides methods to include these effects in analyses.

Findings

D0-D0bar mixing can impact gamma extraction significantly

Neglecting mixing introduces measurable errors

Strategies to incorporate mixing effects are discussed

Abstract

Several methods have been devised to measure the weak phase gamma using decays of the type B+- --> D K+-, where it is assumed that there is no mixing in the D0-D0bar system. However, when using these methods to uncover new physics, one must entertain the real possibility that the measurements are affected by new physics effects in the D0-D0bar system. We show that even values of x_D and/or y_D around 10^{-2} can have a significant impact in the measurement of sin^2{gamma}. We discuss the errors incurred in neglecting this effect, how the effect can be checked, and how to include it in the analysis.