Global analysis of two-body D → VP decays within the framework of flavor symmetry

Two-body charmed meson decays D -> VP are studied within the framework of the diagrammatic approach. Under flavor SU(3) symmetry, all the flavor amplitude sizes and their associated strong phases are extracted by performing a chi(2) fit. Thanks to the recent measurement of D-s(+) -> pi(+) rho(0), the magnitudes and the strong phases of the W-annihilation amplitudes A(P, V) have been extracted for the first time. As a consequence, the branching fractions of all the D -> VP decays are predicted, especially those modes that could not be predicted previously due to the unknown A(P, V). Our working assumption, the flavor SU(3) symmetry, is tested by comparing our predictions with experiment for the singly and doubly Cabibbo-suppressed decay modes based on the flavor amplitudes extracted from the Cabibbo-favored decays using the current data. The predictions for the doubly Cabibbo-suppressed channels are in good agreement with the data, while those for the singly Cabibbo-suppressed decay modes are seen to have flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking effects. We find that the inclusion of SU(3) symmetry breaking in color-allowed and color-suppressed tree amplitudes is needed in general in order to have a better agreement with experiment. Nevertheless, the exact flavor SU(3)-symmetric approach alone is adequate to provide an overall explanation for the current data.