Observation of Exclusive Decay Modes ofb-Flavored Mesons

Abstract

jB-meson decays to final states consisting of a D° or D* £ and one or two charged pions have been observed. The charged-B mass is 5270.8± 2.3 ±2.0 MeV and the neutral-E mass is 5274.2±1.9±2.0 MeV. PACS numbers: 14.40.Jz, 13.25.+m, 13.65. + iThe upsiion states 1 are interpreted as q-q resonances of a new quark, the b quark. The first three resonances are narrow, 2 ' 3 implying bound b flavor and a suppressed strong decay. The large width of the T(4S) resonance discovered at the e + e~ storage ring CESR 4 (Cornell Electron Storage Ring) and the observation that the decay products from the T(4S) include high-momentum leptons 5 imply that the T(4S) decays strongly into BB meson pairs, which then decay weakly. Until now, however, the b-flavored mesons themselves had not been found. Here we report that

Beauty at High Precision / High Sensitivity [Slides]

“…B mesons were first reconstructed by the CLEO Collaboration in 1983 in final states containing D 0 or D * ± and one or two charged pions [22]. I call your attention to the low statistics shown in Figure 5; what a contrast to the enormous samples available today!…”

Rare decays of b hadrons

“…After the discovery of the b quark at Fermilab through the observation of mesons formed by a b and an b anti-quark in 1977 [34] and of the B meson at Cornell [35,36] , searches for rare decays of b hadrons rapidly took pace. The first limit on the decay B 0 → µ + µ − was set by the CLEO collaboration in 1985 [37], the start of a long quest during which the sensitivity was improved by six orders of magnitude, as illustrated in Fig.…”

Heavy meson physics: what have we learned in twenty years?

“…B-mesons were first found and reported by the CLEO collaboration in a paper which for once is straight and to the point in its title ("Observation of Exclusive Decay Modes of b-Flavored Mesons") and in its abstract (see Ref. [13]). To be sure, B-mesons had been inferred from the observation of high momentum leptons in Υ ′′′ decays, but it was the reconstruction of a few exclusive decays that demonstrated their existence conclusively.…”