Rediscovery of B --> K*l+l- and search for B --> πll+l- decays at Belle (II)

	The SuperKEKB asymmetric collider at Tsukuba (Japan), the successor of KEKB, is the highest luminosity machine in the world. It is designed to attain a peak luminosity of 8x1035 cm-2s-1 with an ultimate goal of delivering 50 ab-1 of e+e- collision data to the Belle II experiment by 2028. Till now, Belle II has collected about 30 fb-1 of data. In this early stage of running of the experiment, I am working towards the rediscovery of B --> K*l+l- decays, where l denotes an electron or a muon.  Mediated by flavor-changing neutral current transitions, these decays are forbidden at tree level and

	can occur at higher-order loop level in the standard model. Recently they have garnered a lot of attentions, thanks to the so-called RK* anomaly, where the LHCb experiment finds a tantalizing deviation between its RK* measurement and theory prediction. In addition to this interesting channel, I am searching for even suppressed decays B --> πll+l- . These decays provide a complementary new-physics probe profiting from their lower branching fractions and larger expected CP violation asymmetry compared to B--> K*l+l- . This talk will cover the current status and future plan for the aforementioned physics channels before concluding with my physics performance study involving electron and muon identification.