The first Europhysics Study Conference on Electroweak Effects at High Energies was held at the "Ettore Majorana" Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice, Sicily from February 1 -12, 1983. The conference was attended by 61 physicists from 11 countries. The conference was sponsored by the European Physical Society, the Italian Ministry of Public Education, the Italian Ministry of Technological Research, the Sicilian Regional Government and the California Institute of Technology. CONFERENCE FORMAT The Study Conference followed a new intensive format in which the state of our knowledge of the electroweak interaction, and the relation of the electroweak sector to Grand Unified and Superunified Theories was reviewed in some depth. During the two week conference, 54 experimental and theoretical talks were presented, and four evening discussion sessions were held. The Erice surroundings, the wide-ranging conference program, and the fact that nearly all of the participants were directly involved in recent major experimental or theoretical developments, led to animated and very friendly discussions. Participants had the rare opportunity to view most of the major trends in high energy physics in a short interval of time, and to discuss and contemplate the trends in the uniquely peaceful yet stimulating atmosphere which is an Erice tradition.

A graduate-level description of how the theory of electroweak interactions, or so-called "Standard Model" unifies the weak and electromagnetic forces of nature in high energy physics.

This volume deals with the electroweak interactions at low and high energies. The results of the collider experiments are discussed, and the low energy experiments with complications for astrophysics are considered. Also, theoretical developments are presented to highlight the impact of forthcoming experiments and to find new directions of study.

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.

This book mainly investigates the precision predictions on the signal of new physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) scheme. The potential of the LHC to discover the signal of dark matter associated production with a photon is studied after including next-to-leading order QCD corrections. The factorization and resummation of t-channel top quark transverse momentum distribution in the standard model at both the Tevatron and the LHC with soft-collinear effective theory are presented. The potential of the early LHC to discover the signal of monotops is discussed. These examples illustrate the method of searching for new physics beyond what is known today with high precision.

This book is devoted to the broad subject of flavor physics, embracing the question of what distinguishes one type of elementary particles from another. The articles range from the forefront of formal theory (treating the physics of extra dimensions) to details of particle detectors. Although special emphasis is placed on the physics of kaons, charmed and beauty particles, top quarks, and neutrinos, the articles also dealing with electroweak physics, quantum chromodynamics, supersymmetry, and dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking. Violations of fundamental symmetries such as time reversal invariance are discussed in the context of neutral kaons, beauty particles, electric dipole moments, and parity violation in atoms. The physics of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix and of quark masses are described in some detail, both from the standpoint of present and future experimental knowledge and from a more fundamental viewpoint, where physicists are still searching for the correct theory.

"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"--