Phenomenological Applications of QCD Factorization to Semi-Inclusive B Decays

We have systematically investigated the semi-inclusive B decays B → MX, which are manifestations of the quark decay b → Mq, within a framework inspired by QCD-improved factorization. These decays are theoretically clean and have distinctive experimental signatures. We focus on a class of these that do not require any form factor information and therefore may be especially suitable for extracting information on the angles α and γ of the unitarity triangle. The strong phase coming from final-state rescattering due to hard gluon exchange between the final states can induce large rate asymmetries for tree-dominated color-suppressed modes (π ⁰,ρ ^0,ω )X_{bar s}. The nonfactorizable hard spectator interactions in the 3-body decay B -> Mq_{1bar {q}_2}, though phase-space suppressed, are extremely important for the tree-dominated modes (π ⁰,ρ ^0,ω )X_{bar s}, φX, J/ψX_s, J/ψX and the penguin-dominated mode ω X_{sbar {s}}. Our result for {B}(B -> J/ψ X_s) is in agreement with experiment. /line{B}⁰_s -> (π ⁰,ρ ^0,ω) X_{bar s}, ρ ⁰X_{sbar s}, /line{B}⁰ -> (K^-X, K^* -X) and B^- → (K⁰X_s, K^*0X_s) are the most promising ones in searching for direct CP violation: they have branching ratios of order 10^-6 - 10^-4 and CP rate asymmetries of order (10 - 40)%.