This book is dedicated to Lev Okun, who passed away in November 2015. He was a true pioneer in probing fundamental dynamics.The book has two objectives. First is to showcase Okun's impact for decades since 1963, when he published his remarkable book Weak Interaction of Elementary Particles. Second is to present the current progress of our scientific community in the studies of our Universe. New directions and possible future developments are discussed, often using the past as a guide. The authors mostly focus on CP asymmetries in the transitions of hadrons and leptons, but they also discuss their rare decays, and talk about axions and supersymmetry, and possible connections with dark matter, extra dimensions, baryogenesis and multiverse.This book is suitable for readers who know quantum mechanics and quantum field theories in general.

Our current understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the Universe, summarised by the Standard Model of particle physics, is incomplete. For example, it fails to explain why we do not see equal, or almost equal, numbers of particles and their antiparticle partners. To explain this asymmetry requires, among other effects, a mechanism known as charge-parity (CP) violation that causes differences between the rates at which particles and antiparticles decay. CP violation is seen in systems containing bottom and strange quarks, but not in those with up, charm or top quarks. This thesis describes searches for particle-antiparticle asymmetries in the decay rates of charmed mesons. No evidence of CP violation is found. With current sensitivities, an asymmetry large enough to observe probably could not be explained by the Standard Model. Instead an explanation could come from new physics, for example contributions from supersymmetric or other undiscovered heavy particles. In the thesis, the development of new techniques to search for these asymmetries is described. They are applied to data from the LHCb experiment at CERN to make precise measurements of asymmetries in the D^+->K^-K^+pi^+ decay channel. This is the most promising charged D decay for CP violation searches.

This 2nd edition is an extensive update of "B Decays?. The revisions are necessary because of the extensive amount of new data and new theoretical ideas. This book reviews what is known about b-quark decays and also looks at what can be learned in the future.The importance of this research area is increasing, as evidenced by the approval of the luminosity upgrade for CESR and the asymmetric B factories at SLAC and KEK, and the possibility of experiments at hadron colliders.The key experimental observations made thus far, measurement of the lifetimes of the different B species, B0-B0 mixing, the discovery of ?Penguin? mediated decays, and the extraction of the CKM matrix elements Vub and Vcb from semileptonic decays, as well as more mundane results, are described in great detail by the experimentalists who have been closely involved with making the measurements. Theoretical progress in understanding b-quark decays using HQET and lattice gauge techniques are described by theorists who have developed and used these techniques.Synthesizing the experimental and theoretical information, several articles discuss the implications for the ?Standard Model? and how further tests can be done using measurements of CP violation in the B system.

This first open access volume of the handbook series contains articles on the standard model of particle physics, both from the theoretical and experimental perspective. It also covers related topics, such as heavy-ion physics, neutrino physics and searches for new physics beyond the standard model. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the "Particle Physics Reference Library" provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physics, accelerators and detectors (volumes 21A, B1,B2,C), which took stock of the field approximately one decade ago. Central to this new initiative is publication under full open access

This comprehensive work thoroughly introduces and reviews the set of results from Belle and BaBar - after more than two decades of independent and complementary work - all the way from the detectors and the analysis tools used, up to the physics results, and the interpretation of these results. The world’s two giant B Factory collaborations, Belle at KEK and BaBar at SLAC, have successfully completed their main mission to discover and quantify CP violation in the decays of B mesons. CP violation is a necessary requirement to distinguish unambiguously between matter and antimatter. The shared primary objective of the two B Factory experiments was to determine the shape of the so-called unitarity triangle, an abstract triangle representing interactions of quarks, the elementary constituents of matter. The area of the triangle is a measure of the amount of CP violation associated with the weak force. Many other measurements have been performed by the B Factories and are also discussed in this work.