This thesis describes a high-quality, high-precision method for the data analysis of an interesting elementary particle reaction. The data was collected at the Japanese B-meson factory KEKB with the Belle detector, one of the most successful large-scale experiments worldwide. CP violation is a subtle quantum effect that makes the world look different when simultaneously left and right and matter and antimatter are exchanged. This being a prerequisite for our own world to have developed from the big bang, there are only a few experimental indications of such effects, and their detection requires very intricate techniques. The discovery of CP violation in B meson decays garnered Kobayashi and Maskawa, who had predicted these findings as early as 1973, the 2008 Nobel prize in physics. This thesis describes in great detail what are by far the best measurements of branching ratios and CP violation parameters in two special reactions with two charm mesons in the final state. It presents an in-depth but accessible overview of the theory, phenomenology, experimental setup, data collection, Monte Carlo simulations, (blind) statistical data analysis, and systematic uncertainty studies.

Direct CP violation can exist in untagged, neutral B-meson decays to certain self-conjugate, hadronic final states. As a necessary condition, the resonances which appear therein must permit the identification of distinct, CP-conjugate states--in analogy to stereochemistry, we term such states ''CP-enantiomers.'' These states permit the construction of CP-even and CP-odd amplitude combinations and of observables sensitive to their interference, which are non-zero if direct CP violation is present. The decay B[yields][pi][sup+][pi][sup -][pi][sup 0], containing the distinct CP-conjugate states[rho][sup+][pi][sup -] and[rho][sup -][pi][sup+], provides one such example of a CP-enantiomeric pair. We illustrate the possibilities in various multi-particle final states.

The articles collected in this volume are mainly concerned with the phenomenological description of the 1964 discovery on K° decay that CP invariance was violated in nature. The variety of models developed to explain this CP violation are described together with reprints of more recent definitive experiments, and CP violation in the B° system and the electric dipole moment of the neutron is also covered.

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

http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/0496

This account presents background information and theoretical tools necessary for understanding CP violation.