Non-leptonic two-body B decays beyond factorization

We present a general scheme and scale independent parameterization of two-body non-leptonic B decay amplitudes which includes perturbative QCD corrections as well as final state interactions in a consistent way. This parameterization is based on the Next-to-Leading effective Hamiltonian for non-leptonic B decays and on Wick contractions in the matrix elements of the local operators. Using this parameterization, and making no dynamical assumption, we present a classification of two-body B decay channels in terms of the parameters entering in the decay amplitudes. This classification can be considered as the starting point For a model-independent analysis of non-leptonic B decays and of CP-violating asymmetries. We also propose, on the basis of the large-N expansion, a possible hierarchy among the different effective parameters. We discuss the strategy to extract the most important effective parameters from the experimental data. Finally, we establish a connection between our parameterization and the diagrammatic approach which is widely used in the literature. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.