Estimating the I=3/2Kπ interaction in D decay

Heavy flavour decay to light hadrons is the key to understanding many aspects of the Standard Model from CP violation to strong dynamics. It is often presumed in line with the simple quark spectator model of D decay to Kππ that the Kπ system has only I=1/2. E791 have recently presented an analysis of their results on D+→(K−π+)π+ using a generalised isobar picture of two body interactions. While higher Kπ waves are described by sums of known resonances, the S-wave amplitude and phase are determined bin-by-bin in Kπ mass. The phase variation is found not to be that of K−π+ elastic scattering. This hints at a different mixture of I=1/2 and I=3/2S-wave interactions than in elastic scattering. Applying Watson's theorem to this generalised isobar model allows us to estimate the I=3/2Kπ S-wave component. We indeed find that this is larger than in hadronic scattering or semileptonic processes.