Triple-Product Correlations in B -> V1 V2 Decays and New Physics

In this paper we examine T-violating triple-product correlations (TP's) in B -> V1 V2 decays. TP's are excellent probes of physics beyond the standard model (SM) for two reasons: (i) within the SM, most TP's are expected to be tiny, and (ii) unlike direct CP asymmetries, TP's are not suppressed by the small strong phases which are expected in B decays. TP's are obtained via the angular analysis of B -> V1 V2. In a general analysis based on factorization, we demonstrate that the most promising decays for measuring TP's in the SM involve excited final-state vector mesons, and we provide estimates of such TP's. We find that there are only a handful of decays in which large TP's are possible, and the size of these TP's depends strongly on the size of nonfactorizable effects. We show that TP's which vanish in the SM can be very large in models with new physics. The measurement of a nonzero TP asymmetry in a decay where none is expected would specifically point to new physics involving large couplings to the right-handed b-quark.