The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

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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.

Contents:CP Phenomenology:Introduction to CP Violation (C Jarlskog)CP-Violation in the K0-K0-System (K Kleinknecht)The Quark Mixing Matrix, Charm Decays and B Decays (S Stone)The Question of CP Noninvariance — As Seen through the Eyes of Neutral Beauty (I I Bigi et al.)In Search of CP Noninvariance in Heavy Quark Systems (L-L Chau)CP Violation at High Energy e+e- Colliders (J Bernabéu & M B Gavela)CP Violation in the Standard Model with Four Families (A Datta & E A Paschos)CP Effects When Neutrinos are their Own Antiparticles (B Kayser)On Spontaneous CP Violation Triggered by Scalar Bosons (I I Bigi & A I Sanda)CP Violation and Left-Right Symmetry (R N Mohapatra)CP Violation and Supersymmetry (R N Mohapatra)Electric Dipole Moments (S M Barr & W H Marciano)Special Topics: The Strong CP Problem (R D Peccei)CP Violation and Cosmology (P Langacker)Nonleptonic Interactions:The 1/N Approach to Nonleptonic Weak Interactions (A J Buras)Chiral Perturbation Theory Approach to Weak Amplitudes (E de Rafael)What We Learnt from Weak Decays of Heavy Quarks (B Stech)Weak Hamiltonian on the Lattice (G Martinelli) Readership: High energy physicists. Keywords:CP Violation;Quark Mixing Matrix;Charm Decays;B Decays;Nonleptic Interactions;Heavy QuarksReview: “Similar material is most often available in journals, but the book accomplishes a valuable service in drawing it together … the one that will probably have the greatest utility and longest lifespan is the survey of B meson physics by I Bigi, V Khoze, N Uraltsev and A Sanda … Bigi et al. here provide the most thorough and readable account of the issues that I know of. I have seen no review comparable to the excellent summary of electric dipole moments by S Barr and W Marciano … the volume offers a generally readable entry into this field for a reader who has a basic background in particle physics.” John F Donoghue Science “… this book performs a very useful service for anyone active or interested in CP violation, both as a source of primary information and as a work of reference.” K J Peach J Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys.