Charm Semileptonic Decays.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 2 0 5 0 6 7 v 1 2 1 M a y 2 0 0 2 Charm Semileptonic Decays Jim Wiss Department of Physics University of Illinois Urbana, IL,61801, USA I discuss new data on charm semileptonic decay concentrating on two topics in- volving the decay D+ → K?π+μ+ν. The first topic is the observation of interference in this decay by the FOCUS collaboration[1]. The second are new measurements of branching ratio of D+ → K ?0 ?+ν? relative to D + → K?π+π+ from CLEO[2] and FOCUS. Fig. 1 shows the D+ → K ?0 ?+ν? signals of these two groups. 0970202-003 Data Points Fit Background 300 100 200 0 E n t r ie s / 0 .0 2 ( G e V /c 2 ) 0.64 1.04 1.14 1.240.74 0.84 0.94 K mass (GeV/c 2 ) 2 = 20.9/(30 - 5) C.L. = 69.7% Figure 1: D+ → K?π+μ+ν signal. (left) The FOCUS right-sign and wrong-sign samples are shown. The wrong-sign-subtracted yield is 31 254 events. (right) A partial sample of D?+ → π0D+ → π0(K ?0 e+ν) from CLEO. This is the sample form one of their bins in the D? ?D mass difference. 1 Interference in D+ → K?π+μ+ν In our attempts to fit for the form factors controlling the decay D+ → K ?0 μ+ν, we discovered a large, unexpected asymmetry in the cos θv distribution shown in Fig. 2. This asymmetry was very strong for events with a mKπ mass below the pole and weak for events above the pole. It was possible to understand the forward-backward 1 DW K* c n p q l q V K l Figure 2: (left) Definition of the three decay angles: cos θv is the decay angle of the kaon in the K ?0 frame, cos θ? is the angle of the charged lepton in the virtual W+ frame. χ is the acoplanarity angle between the two decay planes. (right) Event distribution in cos θv, split between samples below and above 0.9 GeV/c 2. The points with error bars are (wrong-sign subtracted) FOCUS data and the solid histogram is a Monte Carlo simulation with efficiency and known charm backgrounds but no interference. asymmetry in cos θv using the simple model summarized by Eqn. 1. Using the nota- tion of [