Measurement of branching fractions for exclusive B decays to charmonium final states

We report branching fraction measurements for exclusive decays of charged and neutral B mesons into two-body final states containing a charmonium meson. We use a sample of $22.72\pm 0.36$ million $B\overline{B}$ events collected between October 1999 and October 2000 with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II storage rings at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The charmonium mesons considered here are $J/\psi ,$ $\psi \mathrm{}\left(2S\right),$ and ${\chi }_{c1\mathrm{}},$ and the light meson in the decay is either a K, $K^{*},$ or ${\pi }^0.$