Dealing with the CP violation, from quarks to leptons, this publication reviews the field, from both the theoretical and experimental point of view, while planning for the experimentation at LHC and considering possible facilities for kaon, B meson and neutrino physics.

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CP violation is one of the most subtle effects in the Standard Model of particle physics and may be the first clue to the physics that lies beyond. Charge conjugation, C, and parity, P, are symmetries of particle interactions. C corresponds to the operation of replacing a particle by its antiparticle, while P is the operation of mirror reflection. Before 1956, it was believed that these were also symmetries of the interactions of elementary particles. In 1956, C S Wu found evidence for P violation in the weak interaction. Theorists proposed that the combination of CP would be a symmetry of the weak interaction. In 1964, Christenson, Cronin, Fitch and Turlay found the first evidence for the violation of CP symmetry in the decays of kaons.Although Kobayashi and Maskawa then showed how the Standard Model can accommodate the observed CP violation, Wolfenstein pointed out that it is also possible that there is a new interaction in addition to the usual four, called the superweak interaction, which is responsible for the asymmetry. To test this idea, the observation of a different type of asymmetry, called direct CP violation, is required; in the kaon sector, very precise measurements of the ratio of kaon decay rates are necessary. In B decay modes where a second order weak process whimisically named “penguin” interferes with another suppressed, first order “tree” amplitude, it may also be possible to observe these direct CP-violating effects.B physics and CP violation is now one of the major growth areas in high energy physics. Nearly every major high energy physics laboratory now has a project underway to observe the large CP asymmetries expected in the B sector and to test the consistency of the Standard Model. The unitarity of the Kobayashi-Maskawa mixing matrix in the Standard Model implies the existence of three phases, called alpha, beta and gamma, which can be determined by the measurements of CP asymmetries in B decays. About 200 participants gathered in Hawaii in March 1997 to discuss the progress in the field, and this important book constitutes the proceedings of that conference.

The exciting experiments of the BABAR and BELLE collaborations have now proven violation of CP symmetry in the neutral B system. This has renewed strong interest in the physics of CP violation. Novel experimental techniques and new highly intense neutron sources are now becoming available to further test the related time reversal symmetry. They will substantially lower the current limit on the neutron electric dipole moment and hence open up new tests of theoretical concepts beyond the Standard Model. These are strongly required to explain the decisive excess of matter versus antimatter in our Universe. There is a de?nite need to communicate these exciting developments to younger scientists, and therefore we organized a summer school in October 2000 on “CP Violation and Related Topics”, which was held in Prerow, a small Baltic Sea resort. These Lecture Notes were inspired by the vivid - terest of the participants, and I am grateful to the authors, who faced the unexpected and delivered all the material for an up-to-date introduction to this broad ?eld. It is a great pleasure for me to warmly thank the Co-organizers of the summer school, Henning Schr ̈oder, Thomas Mannel, Klaus R. Schubert and my colleague Roland Waldi. Also I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Volkswagen-Stiftung for their ?nancial support of this inspiring summer school.

For a long time after the discovery in 1964, by Christenson, Cronin, Fitch and Turlay, that the long-lived neutral kaon decays both into three and into two pions, which has since been taken as proof of CP violation, successive new and more precise experiments confirmed the original evidence and provided results compatible with a phenomenological description confining the CP violation to the mixing between neutral kaons and antikaons. However the Standard Model, with three generations of quarks, linking as it does CP violation to the presence of a single non trivial phase in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix, implies that if CP violation exists at all, then it is a general property of weak interactions, appearing in transitions were amplitudes involving all three quark families interfere with each other, producing effects with a magnitude related to that of the CKM coefficients. This fact has stimulated an impressive amount of theoretical work leading in many cases to precise predictions. This publication reviews the field, from both the theoretical and experimental point of view, while planning for the forthcoming experimentation at LHC and considering possible new facilities for kaon, B meson and neutrino physics. Abstracted in Inspec

The violation of charge-conjugation and parity symmetries is a leading area of research in particle and nuclear physics, with important implications for understanding the generation of matter in the universe. This book provides a self-contained introduction and is designed to bring beginning researchers to the forefront of the field.