This book takes a fresh approach to the teaching of discrete symmetries which are central to fundamental physics: mirror symmetry, matter/anti-matter symmetry, and time reversal. It is self-contained and includes detailed discussions of relevant experiments - conveying some of the fascination and intellectual challenges of experimental physics.

This book offers the first strong evidence of the existence of CP violation in neutral B decays extracted from sophisticated B factories in the US and Japan. It also holds out the expectation of rare B decays and D, K physics in the near future. In addition, new physics beyond the Standard Model is described. Both experimental and theoretical points of view are given.

"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"--

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.

The 28th conference from the Rochester series was the major high energy physics conference in 1996. Volume one contains short reports on new theoretical and experimental results. Volume two consists of the review talks presented in the plenary sessions.

The Lepton-Photon symposiums ? as represented by the contributions in this volume ? are among the most popular conferences in high energy physics since they give an in-depth snapshots of the status of the field as provided by leading experts.The volume covers the latest results on flavor factories, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), electroweak physics, dark matter searches, neutrino physics and cosmology, from a phenomenological point of view. It also offers a glimpse of the immediate future of the field through summaries on the status of the next generation of high energy accelerators and planned facilities for astroparticle physics.The review nature of the articles makes the volume particularly useful to students, as well as being of interest to established researches in high-energy physics and related fields.