Enhanced electroweak penguin amplitude in B→VV decays -: art. no. 141801

We discuss a novel electromagnetic penguin contribution to the transverse helicity amplitudes in B decays to two vector mesons, which is enhanced by two powers of m(B)/Lambda relative to the standard penguin amplitudes. This leads to unique polarization signatures in penguin-dominated decay modes such as B ->rho K-* similar to polarization effects in the radiative decay B -> K(*)gamma and offers new opportunities to probe the magnitude and chirality of flavor-changing neutral current couplings to photons.