This thesis reports on the final measurement of the flavor-mixing phase in decays of strange-bottom mesons (B_s) into J/psi and phi mesons performed in high-energy proton-antiproton collisions recorded by the Collider Experiment at Fermilab. Interference occurs between direct decays and decays following virtual particle-antiparticle transitions (B_s-antiB_s). The phase difference between transition amplitudes (“mixing phase”) is observable and extremely sensitive to contributions from non-standard-model particles or interactions that may be very hard to detect otherwise – a fact that makes the precise measurement of the B_s mixing phase one of the most important goals of particle physics. The results presented include a precise determination of the mixing phase and a suite of other important supplementary results. All measurements are among the most precise available from a single experiment and provide significantly improved constraints on the phenomenology of new particles and interactions.

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.

This first open access volume of the handbook series contains articles on the standard model of particle physics, both from the theoretical and experimental perspective. It also covers related topics, such as heavy-ion physics, neutrino physics and searches for new physics beyond the standard model. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the "Particle Physics Reference Library" provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physics, accelerators and detectors (volumes 21A, B1,B2,C), which took stock of the field approximately one decade ago. Central to this new initiative is publication under full open access

CP violation is a well-established phenomenon in particle physics, but until 2001 it was only observed in kaons. In the last decade, several matter-antimatter asymmetries have been observed in neutral B mesons in line with the expectations of the Standard Model of the weak interaction. Direct CP violation is also expected in the decay rates of charged B+ mesons versus that of B- mesons, though the greatest effects are present in a decay that occurs just twice in 10 million decays. Such rarity requires huge samples to study and this is exactly what the LHC, and its dedicated B-physics experiment LHCb provide. This thesis presents an analysis of the first two years of LHCb data. The author describes the first observation of the rare decay, B- → DK-, D → π-K+ and the first observation of direct CP violation in this B decay. The work constitutes essential information on the experiment’s measurement of a fundamental parameter of the theory and stands as a benchmark against which subsequent analyses of this type will be compared.

This thesis describes the thorough analysis of the rare B meson decay into φ K* on data taken by the Belle Collaboration at the B-meson-factory KEKB over 10 years. This reaction is very interesting, because it in principle allows the observation of CP-violation effects. In the Standard Model however, no CP violation in this reaction is expected. An observation of CP asymmetries thus immediately implies new physics. This thesis presents an amplitude analysis of this decay and the search for CP violation in detail and discusses methods to solve related problems: The quantification of multivariate dependence and the improvement of numeric evaluation speed of normalization integrals in amplitude analysis. In addition it provides an overview of the theory, experimental setup, (blind) statistical data analysis and estimation of systematic uncertainties.