Direct CP violation in B→φKs and new physics -: art. no. 231802

In the presence of large new physics contributions to loop-induced b-->s transitions, sizable direct CP violation in B-->phiK decays is expected on general grounds. We compute explicitly CP-violating effects using QCD factorization and find that, even in the restricted case in which new physics has the same penguin structure as the standard model, the rate asymmetry can be of the order of 1. We briefly discuss a more general scenario and comment on the inclusion of power-suppressed corrections to factorization.