Rare B Meson Decays: A Window to Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

Rare K meson decays have played a crucial role in formulating the standard model. The B meson system is similar to the K meson system in that their major, uninteresting, decays are suppressed by small mixing angles. Thus rare B decays may place equally interesting constraints on the standard model. Cognizant of this possibility, many authors have studied: models with additional generations (we call this class of models fourth generation models (4G)) [1]; models with additional physical Higgs scalars (multi-Higgs (MH)) [2]; models with supersymmetric particles (SUSY) [3]; and L-R symmetric (LRS) models [4] to look for predictions which deviate from those of the standard model (SM). In this review, we shall study how B meson decays serve as a window to look beyond the standard model [5]. Since it is impossible to cover all grounds, we choose one interesting scenerio: We note that recently discovered B-B mixing requires m_t>50GeV within the context of the standard model with reasonable value for its parameters.