We report measurements of branching fractions and charge asymmetries of exclusive decays of neutral and charged $B$ mesons into two-body final states containing a charmonium state and a light strange meson. The charmonium mesons considered are $J/\psi$, $\psi (2S)$ and ${\chi }_{c1}$, and the light meson is either $K$ or $K^{*}$. We use a sample of about $124\times {10}^6$ $B\overline{B}$ pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

• Received 22 December 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.141801