CP violation and strong phases from penguins in B±→VV decays

We calculate direct CP-violating observables in charged B → VV decays arising from the interference of amplitudes with different strong and CKM phases. The perturbative strong phases develop at order αs from absorptive parts of one-loop matrix elements of the next-to-leading logarithm corrected effective Hamiltonian. CPT constraints are maintained. Based on this model, we find that partial rate asymmetries between charge conjugate B± decays can be as high as 15-30% for certain channels with branching ratios in the 10-6 range. The small values of the coefficients of angular correlations, which we calculated previously to be of order 10-2, are not significantly degraded by the strong phases. The charge asymmetries of rates and angular distributions would provide unambiguous evidence for direct CP violation. (orig.)