Long range QCD effects in nonleptonic weak decays

Nonleptonic weak decays are very sensitive to nonperturbative quark-quark and quark-antiquark correlations. It is shown that effects of scalar diquarks dominate strange particle decays and are responsible for the drastic |ΔI| = 1/2 enhancement observed in these transitions. They also give rise to a large long range contribution to the KL - KS mass difference. In more energetic processes, scalar diquarks are less important, but their contribution is still sizeable in inclusive D and Ds decays. The generation of virtual diquark pairs appears as an effective first step in the formation of baryons in B decays. 8 refs., 2 figs