This conference series reviews progress in understanding the physics of the 5th quark (beauty quark or bottom quark) and the properties of particles containing a b-quark. These quarks are produced at particle accelerators such as electron-positron accelerators or hadron colliders with the latter being the focus of the conference. One of the main issues in understanding the physics of the 5th quark is CP violation, a mechanism in particle physics that breaks the symmetry of nature between particles and antiparticles ultimately connected to the particle-antiparticle asymmetry of the universe. Topics include: recent results; CP violation; B production and spectroscopy; detectors, hardware, and computing; Vucb, Vub, and factorization; B lifetimes and mixing; rare decays; B trigger at future experiments; B physics at future hadron machines; the future of flavor.

This important book covers topics that are of major interest to the high energy physics community, including the most recent results from flavour factories, dark matter and neutrino physics. In addition, it considers future high energy machines.

Hadron colliders probe physics at new energy frontiers and search for new particles and forces. In addition, hadron colliders now provide also an environment for precision physics. The present volume collects the results from recently completed runs at major colliders as well as new ideas about collider physics and techniques. It will serve as the main source of reference in the field for many years to come.

This book gathers the proceedings of The Hadron Collider Physics Symposia (HCP) 2005, and reviews the state-of-the-art in the key physics directions of experimental hadron collider research. Topics include QCD physics, precision electroweak physics, c-, b-, and t-quark physics, physics beyond the Standard Model, and heavy ion physics. The present volume serves as a reference for everyone working in the field of accelerator-based high-energy physics.

This will be a required acquisition text for academic libraries. More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. This extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as examining in detail the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, the author provides an overview of top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider.

The ALICE experiment is one of the experiments currently prepared for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, starting operation end of 2007. ALICE is dedicated to the research on nucleus-nucleus collisions at ultra-relativistic energies, which addresses the properties of strongly interacting matter under varying conditions of high density and temperature. The conditions provided at the LHC allow significant qualitative improvement with respect to previous studies. In particular, energetic probes, light quarks and gluons, will be abundantly produced. These probes might be identified by their fragmentation into correlated particles, so called jets, of high enough energy to allow full reconstruction of jet properties; even in the underlying heavy-ion environment.Understanding the dependence of high-energy jet production and fragmentation influenced by the dense medium created in the collision region is an open field of active research. Generally, one expects energy loss of the probes due to medium-induced gluon radiation. It is suggested that hadronization products of these, rather soft gluons may be contained within the jet emission cone, resulting in a modification of the characteristic jet fragmentation, as observed via longitudinal and transverse momentum distributions with respect to the direction of the initial parton, as well as of the multiplicity distributions arising from the jet fragmentation. Particle momenta parallel to the jet axis are softened (jet quenching), while transverse to it increased (transverse heating). The present thesis studies the capabilities of the ALICE detectors to measure these jets and quantifies obtainable rates and the quality of jet reconstruction, in both proton-proton and lead-lead collisions at the LHC. In particular, it is addressed whether modification of the jet fragmentation can be detected within the high-particle-multiplicity environment of central lead-lead collisions.