The rare cascade B s → φf 0 (980) → φ π + π − decay is studied with the perturbative QCD approach based on the formula for the quasi two-body decay, where the two-pion pair originates from the S-wave resonant f 0 (980) state. It is found that with the introduction of the nonperturbative two-pion distribution amplitudes and the Flatté parameterization of the scalar form factor for the f 0 (980) resonance, the branching ratio in the mass range 400 MeV < m(π + π − )where the uncertainties come from the parameter a ππ of the two-pion distribution amplitudes, the b quark mass m b , the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) factors, respectively. This result agrees with the recent LHCb measurement within uncertainties, B exp (B 0 s → φ f 0 (980) → φ π + π − ) = (1.12±0.16 +0.09 −0.08 ±0.11)×10 −6 , where the errors are statistical, systematic and from the normalization, respectively. * three-body hadronic decays, the kinematical configurations will vary from region to region in the Dalitz plot, and in principle correspond to different dynamical components and theoretical treatments with special scales. The resonant contributions are entirely engulfed by the blurry background clouds, so any phenomenological parametrization and interpretations of the resonant structures are process-and model-dependent. The effective separations between the perturbative and nonperturbative contributions to the three-body nonleptonic B decays will be much more complicated, which is by no means trivial. However at the same time, the phase space distributions make the theoretical calculation of three-body nonleptonic B meson decays to be very meaningful for exploring some fresh and potentially important information, such as the natures and effects of possible resonances, the energy dependence of observables, the local CP asymmetry distributions in the Dalitz plot, and so on. In the past years, there were plenty of theoretical studies of the three-body nonleptonic B meson decays, such as Refs.[20-39] based on SU(3) relations, Refs.[40-55] based on both heavy quark effective theory and chiral perturbation theory, Refs.[56-71] with factorization approach, Refs.[72-87] with the QCDF approach, Refs.[88-103] with the PQCD approach.Both the PQCD and QCDF approaches have been widely employed in the two-body nonleptonic B meson decays in recent years. In Ref.[88], Chen and Li attempted to generalize the PQCD approach to the three-body nonleptonic B + → K + π + π − decay for the particular configuration topologies where the kinematics is very similar to a two-body decay. In this paper, we shall follow the method of Ref.[88] to investigate the B 0 s → φf 0 (980) → φ π + π − decay with the PQCD approach. The overall layout of this paper is as follows. The theoretical framework and the amplitudes for the B 0 s → φf 0 (980) → φ π + π − decay are elaborated in section II. The numerical results and discussion are presented in Section III. The last section is a short summary.
II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. The effective HamiltonianThe nonleptonic weak decays of the ...