Charmless hadronic decays of B mesons to a pseudoscalar and a tensor meson

We study two-body charmless hadronic decays of B mesons to a pseudoscalar meson (P) and a tensor meson (T) in the frameworks of both flavor SU(3) symmetry and generalized factorization. Certain ways to test the validity of the generalized factorization are proposed, based on the flavor SU(3) analysis. We present a set of relations between a flavor SU(3) amplitude and the corresponding amplitude in the generalized factorization which bridge both approaches in B --> PT decays. The branching ratios and CP asymmetries are calculated using the full effective Hamiltonian including all the penguin operators and the form factors obtained in the non-relativistic quark model of Isgur, Scora, Grinstein and Wise. We identify the decay modes in which the branching ratios and CP asymmetries are expected to be relatively large.