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.

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 book discusses the study of double charm B decays and the first observation of B0->D0D0Kst0 decay using Run I data from the LHCb experiment. It also describes in detail the upgrade for the Run III of the LHCb tracking system and the trigger and tracking strategy for the LHCb upgrade, as well as the development and performance studies of a novel standalone tracking algorithm for the scintillating fibre tracker that will be used for the LHCb upgrade. This algorithm alone allows the LHCb upgrade physics program to achieve incredibly high sensitivity to decays containing long-lived particles as final states as well as to boost the physics capabilities for the reconstruction of low momentum particles.

A comprehensive summary of current research into multiquark hadrons, describing them in terms of constituent quarks, gluons and compact diquarks.

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.

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has withstood thus far every attempt by experimentalists to show that it does not describe data. We discuss the SM in some detail, focusing on the mechanism of fermion mixing, which represents one of its most intriguing aspects. We discuss how this mechanism can be tested in b-quark decays, and how b decays can be used to extract information on physics beyond the SM. We review experimental techniques in b physics, focusing on recent results and highlighting future prospects. Particular attention is devoted to recent results from b decays into a hadron, a lepton and an anti-lepton, that show discrepancies with the SM predictions — the so-called B-physics anomalies — whose statistical significance has been increasing steadily. We discuss these experiments in a detailed manner, and also provide theoretical interpretation of these results in terms of physics beyond the SM.