This book takes a fresh approach to the teaching of discrete symmetries which are central to fundamental physics: mirror symmetry, matter/anti-matter symmetry, and time reversal. It is self-contained and includes detailed discussions of relevant experiments - conveying some of the fascination and intellectual challenges of experimental physics.

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.

"The ultimate question of elementary particle physics is: What is the fundamental Lagrangian of nature surrounding us? The Lagrangian of the SM is very successful in describing nature at the currently available energy range. The discovery of the Higgs boson completed the particle spectrum of the SM and it is another proof of how well the SM works. Nevertheless the SM cannot be the end of the story and it is for sure not the fundamental Lagrangian of nature. The Lagrangian of the SM looses its validity at the latest at the Planck scale where gravitational effects become noticeable.Most physicists think of the SM as an effective theory that has to be replaced by a more fundamental theory above the TeV scale. What the word effective really means will hopefully be clear at later stages of our book. For the time being we will list some problems and open questions of the SM"--

The latest of the 'Lepton Photon' symposium, one of the well-established series of meetings in the high-energy physics community, was successfully organized at the South Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, from August 7-12, 2017, where physicists around the world gathered to discuss the latest advancements in the research field.This proceedings volume of the Lepton Photon 2017 collects contributions by the plenary session speakers and the posters' presenters, which cover the latest results in particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and plans for future facilities.

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

CP violation is a well-established phenomenon in particle physics, but until 2001 it was only observed in kaons. In the last decade, several matter-antimatter asymmetries have been observed in neutral B mesons in line with the expectations of the Standard Model of the weak interaction. Direct CP violation is also expected in the decay rates of charged B+ mesons versus that of B- mesons, though the greatest effects are present in a decay that occurs just twice in 10 million decays. Such rarity requires huge samples to study and this is exactly what the LHC, and its dedicated B-physics experiment LHCb provide. This thesis presents an analysis of the first two years of LHCb data. The author describes the first observation of the rare decay, B- → DK-, D → π-K+ and the first observation of direct CP violation in this B decay. The work constitutes essential information on the experiment’s measurement of a fundamental parameter of the theory and stands as a benchmark against which subsequent analyses of this type will be compared.

Presenting the proceedings of FPCP 2018, this book reviews the status quo of flavor physics and discusses the latest findings in this exciting area. Flavor physics has been instrumental in the formulation and understanding of the standard model, and it is possible that the direction of new physics will be significantly influenced by flavor sector, also known as the intensity frontier, making it possible to indirectly test the existence of new physics up to a very high scale, beyond that of the energy frontier scale accessible at the LHC. The book is intended for academics around the globe involved in particle physics research, professionals associated with the related technologies and those who are interested in learning about the future of physics and its prospects and directions.