Observation of the Decay B+→K+K-π+

We report the observation of charmless hadronic decays of charged B mesons to the final state K+K-π+. Using a data sample of 347.5  fb-1 collected at the Υ(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector, we observe 429±43 signal events with a significance of 9.6σ. We measure the inclusive branching fraction B(B+→K+K-π+)=[5.0±0.5(stat)±0.5(syst)]×10-6. Inspection of the Dalitz plot of signal candidates shows a broad structure peaking near 1.5  GeV/c2 in the K+K- invariant mass distribution. We find the direct CP asymmetry to be consistent with zero.