The symposium focused on the following hot topics of particle physics, such as heavy flavor productions and decays; QCD corrections; EW symmetry breaking theories; precise tests of Standard Model and physics beyond Standard Model; CP violation and rare decays etc. There are 30 talks presented at the symposium by participants from all over the world, who are active in the forefront of the fields.

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.

The twentieth Johns Hopkins Workshop on current problems in particle theory took place in Heidelberg. The topic of the workshop was chosen in view of the phantastic success enjoyed by the standard model of electroweak and strong interactions.Until today, no significant deviations from the predictions of the standard model have been observed. However, precision tests have been dominantly performed in the high-energy domain, where the QCD coupling constant is small enough to allow for a perturbative treatment of the strong interaction. It is therefore very important to consider also the low-energy region for which non-perturbative aspects of QCD come into play.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 'Workshop on Lightcone QCD and Nonperturbative Hadron Physics', held in Adelaide, Australia, in December 1999. The contributions include papers on vacuum structure and zero modes, DLCQ, deep inelastic scattering, lightcone wavefunctions and hadron structure, hadron phenomenology, as well as numerical results from the lattice for both quenched and unquenched QCD.

Contents:Conformal Boundary Conditions — and What They Teach Us (V B Petkova & J-B Zuber)A Physical Basis for the Entropy of the AdS3 Black Hole (S Fernando & F Mansouri)Spinon Formulation of the Kondo Problem (A Klümper & J R Reyes-Martinez)Boundary Integrable Quantum Field Theories (P Dorey)Finite Size Effects in Integrable Quantum Field Theories (F Ravanini)Nonperturbative Analysis of the Two-Frequency Sine-Gordon Model (Z Bajnok et al.)Screening in Hot SU(2) Gauge Theory and Propagators in 3D Adjoint Higgs Model (A Cucchieri et al.)Effective Average Action in Statistical Physics and Quantum Field Theory (Ch Wetterich)Phase Transitions in Non-Hermitean Matrix Models and the “Single Ring” Theorem (J Feinberg et al.)Unraveling the Mystery of Flavor (A Falk)The Nahm Transformation on R2 X T2 (C Ford)A 2D Integrable Axion Model and Target Space Duality (P Forgács)Supersymmetric Ward Identities and Chiral Symmetry Breaking in SUSY QED (M L Walker)and other papers Readership: Theoretical, mathematical and high energy physicists. Keywords: