Heavy quark symmetry in nonleptonic B decays to excited charmed mesons -: art. no. 114006

We show in a model independent way the equality of the branching fractions and strong phases for (B) over bar -->D1M and (B) over bar -->D-2*M at leading order in Lambda(QCD)/Q and alpha(s)(Q) where Q={m(b),m(c),E-M} and M is a light meson. These results apply in the color allowed and color suppressed channels and follow from a factorization theorem in soft-collinear effective theory combined with heavy quark symmetry. The expected heavy quark symmetry suppression of leading order contributions in the color allowed sector based on analysis of semileptonic decays is shown to disappear at maximum recoil. Subleading corrections are suppressed by at least one power of Lambda(QCD)/Q and this is explicitly verified for subleading semileptonic form factors at maximum recoil.