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Electroweak Penguin Decays of B Mesons
Jürgen Kroseberg (SCIPP Santa Cruz & Universität Bonn)
Seminar Room 3, 15:00
Electroweak penguin decays of B mesons are b → s or b → d transitions
with a lepton pair or photon in the final state. Within the Standard Model,
these flavor-changing neutral current processes are forbidden at tree level
and proceed predominantly through one-loop "penguin" diagrams. Virtual
new particles entering the loop would contribute at leading order, possibly
altering decay rates and asymmetries in a measurable way. Thus, the study
of electroweak penguin decays of B mesons can yield powerful New Physics
constraints, which are likely to remain highly relevant in the LHC era.
In this seminar I will review the experimental methods and results of recent
measurements of these decays at the B factories, in particular with the
BaBar detector at the SLAC PEP-II collider.
