Weak Decays of D and Ds Mesons in a Relativistic Quark Model

The transitions of D and D_s, mesons to light vector states are studied in a relativistic constituent quark model based on the Bethe-Salpeter formalism. The form factors are calculated, and the branching fractions for both semileptonic and nonleptonic decays are given. The results show that the form factors for these transitions deviate substantie from the request of heavy quark symmetry. All the branching ratios for D and D_s semileptonic decays are found to be consistent with data, whereas the calculations of nonleptonic D and D_s decays under the factorization assumption do not agree with experiments. This confirms the conjecture that the factorization scheme is much less applicable in D and D_s decays than in B and B_s decays.