B Physics and CP Violation
Abstract
Description
These lectures provide a basic overview of topics related to the study of CP Violation in B decays. In the first lecture, I review the basics of discrete symmetries in field theories, the quantum mechanics of neutral but flavor-non-trivial mesons, and the classification of three types of CP violation. The actual second lecture which I gave will be separately published as it is my Dirac award lecture and is focussed on the separate topic of strong CP Violation. In Lecture 2 here, I cover the Standard Model predictions for neutral B decays, and in particular discuss some channels of interest for CP Violation studies. Lecture 3 reviews the various tools and techniques used to deal with the hadronic physics effects. In Lecture 4, I briefly review the present and planned experiments that can study B decays. I cannot teach all the details of this subject in this short course, so my approach is instead to try to give students a grasp of the relevant concepts and an overview of the available tools. The level of these lectures is introductory. I will provide some references to more detailed treatments and current literature, but this is not a review article so I do not attempt to give complete references to all related literature. By now there are some excellent textbooks that cover this subject in great detail. I refer students to these for more details and for more complete references to the original literature.
Lectures given at Particle Physics School, ICTP, Trieste, July 2001
Lectures given at Particle Physics School, ICTP, Trieste, July 2001