Nonleptonic decays of K mesons revisited

Abstract

We estimate nonfactorizable 1/$N_c$ contributions in the $K\to 2\pi$ amplitudes using the approach proposed in our previous work. It is demonstrated that for the conventional (nonpenguin) operators these contributions are close in magnitude to factorizable $1/N_c$ parts and have the opposite sign. Thus, an approximate rule of discarding $1/N_c$ corrections in $K\to 2\pi$ decays is theoretically confirmed. As a result we find an extra suppression of the matrix element of $O_4$ ($\Delta I=3/2$) and an extra enhancement of the matrix element of $O_1$ ($\Delta I=1/2$). The parameter $B$ describing $K^0-{\bar{K}}^0$ mixing is also discussed.

Comments: 17 pages Report NSF-ITP-92-82,TPI-MINN-92-26-T