Determination of CKM phases through rigid polygons of flavor SU(3) amplitudes

Abstract

Some new methods for the extraction of CKM phases $\alpha$ and $\gamma$ using flavor SU(3) symmetry have been suggested through the construction of rigid polygons in the complex plane with sides equal to the decay amplitudes of B mesons into two mesons belonging to the light (charmless) pseudoscalar octet. These rigid polygons incorporate all the possible amplitude triangles and, being overdetermined, also serve as consistency checks and in estimating the rates of some decay modes. The same techniques also lead to numerous useful amplitude triangles when octet-singlet mixing has been taken into account and nearly physical $\eta ,{\eta }^{\prime }$ are used.

Comments: A few detailed explanations added, some rearrangement of sections and a few minor changes in notation. 19 pages, 1 PostScript figure, uses psfig.sty