It is commonly believed that a careful investigation of the subleading terms
is crucial for a better understanding of the QCD factorization in charmless B
decays. In this work the penguin-dominated B→Kπ decays are discussed
systematically, including the subleading corrections in 1/mb due to soft and
hard gluons, besides the annihilation contributions. Soft-gluon effects for all
the relevant 4-quark effective operators are calculated within the framework of
the light-cone QCD sum rules (LCSR). Our observation is that such soft and hard
corrections are less important than the annihilation effects, enhancing only
the branching ratios by a few percent; the resultant increase in the branching
ratios due to the overall O(1/mb) effects is between about (22−27)
of the QCD factorization results with the O(αs) corrections, as
the weak phase γ(=ImVub∗) ranges from 400 to 800.
Impacts of the involved uncertainties are discussed in some details.Comment: 22 pages,6 figure