Cp Violation (cambridge Monographs On Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics & Cosmology)

CP VIOLATION Why didn’t the matter in our Universe annihilate with antimatter immediately after its creation? The study of CP violation may help to answer this fundamental question. Reflecting the explosion of new results over the last decade, this second edition has been substantially expanded. From basic principles to the front-line of research, this account presents the information and theoretical tools necessary to understand this phenomenon. Charge conjugation, parity and time reversal are introduced, before describing the Kobayashi–Maskawa (KM) theory for CP violation and examining our understanding of CP violation in kaon decays. Following chapters reveal how the discovery of B mesons provided a new laboratory to study CP violation with KM theory predicting large asymmetries, and discuss how these predictions have been confirmed since the first edition of this book. This led to M. Kobayashi and T. Maskawa receiving the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics. Later chapters describe the search for a new theory of nature’s fundamental dynamics. The observation of neutrino oscillations provides opportunities to reveal CP violation in the lepton sector, which might drive baryogenesis in a Big Bang Universe. The importance of close links with experiment is stressed, and numerous problems are included. This book is suitable for researchers in high energy, atomic and nuclear physics and in the history and philosophy of science. Ikaros Bigi was born in Munich, Germany. Following undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Universities of Munich, Oxford and Stanford, he has taught and researched at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics, CERN, RWTH Aachen, UCLA, the University of Oregon, SLAC and the University of Notre Dame. He is a former scholarship student of the Mazimilianeum Foundation and Scholarship Foundation of the German People and has been appointed both a Heisenberg Fellow and a Max-Kade Fellow. Ichiro Sanda was born in Tokyo, and at the age of 14 accompanied his father who was transferred to the United States on business. After a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from Princeton University, he taught and researched at Columbia University, Fermilab and Rockefeller University. In 1992, after 34 years in the US, he went to Japan as a Professor of physics at Nagoya University. He is now the Chairman of the physics department at Kanagawa University. He is a winner of the 10th Inoue Prize (1993) and the 43rd Nishina Memorial Prize (1997). Both prizes have been awarded for his work in CP violation, and on B physics. Since 1980 the authors have written 14 papers together. In their first paper they explained the special role for CP violation played by certain B meson decays; among them was the channel B → ψKS , where the first CP asymmetry outside K decays was established in 2001. In 2004 they were joint