Observation of photon polarization in $B^\pm \to K^\pm\pi^\mp\pi^\pm\gamma$ decays

A study of the flavor-changing neutral current radiative $B^{\pm} \to K^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}\pi^{\pm}\gamma$ decays performed using data collected in proton-proton collisions with the LHCb detector at $7$ and $8\,$TeV center-of-mass energies is presented. In this sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $3\,\text{fb}^{-1}$, nearly $14\,000$ signal events are reconstructed and selected, containing all possible intermediate resonances with a $K^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}\pi^{\pm}$ final state in the $[1.1, 1.9]$\,GeV/$c^{2}$ mass range. The distribution of the angle of the photon direction with respect to the plane defined by the final-state hadrons in their rest frame is studied in intervals of $K^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}\pi^{\pm}$ mass and the asymmetry between the number of signal events found on each side of the plane is obtained. The first direct observation of the photon polarization in the $b \to s\gamma$ transition is reported with a significance of $5.2\,\sigma$.