We show that the presence of intrinsic charm in the hadrons’ light-cone wave functions, even at a few percent level, provides new, competitive decay mechanisms for B decays which are nominally CKM suppressed. For example, the weak decays of the B-meson to two-body exclusive states consisting of strange plus light hadrons, such as $\overrightarrow{B}\pi K,$ are expected to be dominated by penguin contributions since the tree-level $\overrightarrow{b}\mathrm{su}ū$ decay is CKM suppressed. However, higher Fock states in the B wave function containing charm quark pairs can mediate the decay via a CKM-favored $\overrightarrow{b}\mathrm{sc}\overline{c}$ tree-level transition. Such intrinsic charm contributions can be phenomenologically significant. Since they mimic the amplitude structure of “charming” penguin contributions, the latter need not be penguin contributions at all.

• Received 17 August 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.65.054016