Deciphering the Belle II data on $B\to K \nu \bar\nu$ decay in the (dark) SMEFT with minimal flavour violation

Recently, the Belle II collaboration announced the first measurement of $\mathcal B(B^+\to K^+\nu\bar\nu)$, which is found to be about $2.7\sigma$ higher than the SM prediction. We decipher the data with two new physics scenarios: the underlying $b\to s \nu\bar\nu$ transition is, besides the SM contribution, further affected by heavy new mediators that are much heavier than the EW scale, or amended by an additional decay channel with undetected light final states like dark matter or axion-like particles. These two scenarios can be most conveniently analyzed in the SMEFT and the dark SMEFT (DSMEFT) framework, respectively. We consider the flavour structures of the resulting effective operators to be either generic or satisfy the minimal flavour violation (MFV) hypothesis, both for the quark and lepton sectors. In the first scenario, once the MFV is assumed, only one SM-like low-energy effective operator induced by the SMEFT dim-6 operators can account for the Belle II excess, the parameter space of which is, however, excluded by the Belle upper bound on $\mathcal B(B^0\to K^{*0}\nu\bar\nu)$. In the second scenario, it is found that the Belle II excess can be accommodated by 22 of the DSMEFT operators involving one or two scalar, fermionic, or vector dark matters as well as ALPs. These operators also receive dominant constraints from the $B^0\to K^{*0}+$inv and $B_s\to$inv decays. In the MFV hypothesis, the number of viable operators is reduced to 14, and the $B^+\to\pi^+ +$inv and $K^+\to\pi^++$inv decays start to put further constraints. Within the parameter space allowed by all the current experimental data, the $q^2$ distributions (and $F_L$) of the $B\to K^{(*)}+$inv decays are studied for each viable operator. In addition, we, for the first time, calculate systematically the longitudinal polarization fraction $F_L$ of $K^*$ in the $B\to K^*+$inv decays within the DLEFT.
Comment: 51 pages, 13 figures, comments welcome; v2: discussions on $F_L$ of the $B \to K^* + \text{inv}$ decay in the DSMEFT added, errors in the $B \to V + \text{inv}$ decays for some operators involving two scalar or vector DM fields fixed, the related discussions and figures 2, 6, 7, 11 and 12 corrected, main conclusion unchanged, a few comments and refs added