BOUND-STATE EFFECTS IN B-]K-ASTERISK-GAMMA

Applying perturbative QCD methods recently seen to give a good description of the two-body hadronic decays of the B meson, we address the question of bound-state effects on the decay B→K*γ. Consistent with most analyses, we demonstrate that gluonic penguin diagrams, with photonic bremsstrahlung off a quark, change the decay rate by only a few percent. Using an asymptotic distribution amplitude for the K* and just the standard model, we can obtain a branching ratio of a few ×10-5, consistent with the observed rate. © 1995 The American Physical Society.