Flavor Physics for the Millennium

The following sections are included:

• FOREWORD

• CONTENTS

After a short essay on the current state of particle physics, I review the antecedents of the modern picture of the weak and electromagnetic interactions and then undertake a brief survey of the SU(2)_L ⊗ U(1)_Y electroweak theory. I review the features of electroweak phenomenology at tree level and beyond, present an introduction to the Higgs boson and the 1-TeV scale, and examine arguments for enlarging the electroweak theory. I conclude with a brief look at low-scale gravity.

Three possibilities for the origin of CP violation are discussed: (1) the Standard Model in which all CP violation is due to one parameter in the CKM matrix, (2) the superweak model in which all CP violation is due to new physics and (3) the Standard Model plus new physics. A major goal of B physics is to distinguish these possibilities. CP violation implies time reversal violation (TRV) but direct evidence for TRV is difficult to obtain.

These three lectures review the experimental state of electroweak interactions and the search for electroweak symmetry breaking.

We introduce and discuss basic topics in the theory of kaons and charmed particles. In the first part, theoretical methods in weak decays such as operator product expansion, renormalization group and the construction of effective Hamiltonians are presented, along with an elementary account of chiral perturbation theory. The second part describes the phenomenology of the neutral kaon system, CP violation, ε and ε′/ε, rare kaon decays , and some examples of flavour physics in the charm sector.

Experiments in the area of kaon physics are discussed. Two main categories of experiments are considered: those aiming to measure the CP-violation parameter ϵ′/ϵ and those devoted to measuring various rare kaon decays. Characteristic aspects of each type of experiment are presented, and the details of individual experiments are described.

During the past year there has been significant progress in the study of charm mixing. The CLEO Collaboration has reported new results from direct (wrong sign) searches and both CLEO and FOCUS have reported results from lifetime difference (ΔΓ) searches. It seems that the observation of mixing or limits for r_mix of 5 × 10^-5(or better!) will soon be available.

This is an introduction to the use of QCD perturbation theory, emphasizing generic features of the theory that enable one to separate short-time and long-time effects. I also cover some important classes of applications: electron-positron annihilation to hadrons, deeply inelastic scattering, and hard processes in hadron-hadron collisions.

These lectures provide an introduction to lattice methods for nonperturbative studies of Quantum Chromodynamics. Lecture 1 (Ch. 2) is a very vanilla introduction to lattice QCD. Lecture 2 (Ch. 3) describes examples of recent lattice calculations relevant to fixing the parameters of the CKM matrix.

These lectures discuss the θ parameter of QCD. After an introduction to anomalies in four and two dimensions, the parameter is introduced. That such topological parameters can have physical effects is illustrated with two dimensional models, and then explained in QCD using instantons and current algebra. Possible solutions including axions, a massless up quark, and spontaneous CP violation are discussed.

This bibliography contains references in regards to searches for electric dipole moments of atoms and neutrons, and also for atomic parity violation experiments and theory. [The author felt that a separate set of lecture notes would duplicate material already published in these references – Editor.]

Note from Publisher: This article contains the bibliography only.

These lectures contain an elementary introduction to heavy quark symmetry and the heavy quark expansion. Applications such as the expansion of heavy meson decay constants and the treatment of inclusive and exclusive semileptonic B decays are included. The use of heavy quark methods for the extraction of |V_cb| and |V_ub| is presented is some detail.

The role of B decays in the study of CP violation is reviewed. We treat the interactions and spectroscopy of the b quark and then introduce CP violation in B meson decays, including time-dependences, decays to CP eigenstates and non-eigenstates, and flavor tagging. Additional topics include studies of strange B's, decays to pairs of light pseudoscalar mesons, and the roles of gluonic and electroweak penguin diagrams, and final-state interactions.

These notes provide a pedagogical introduction to the theory of non-leptonic heavy-meson decays recently proposed by Beneke, Buchalla, Sachrajda and myself. We provide a rigorous basis for factorization for a large class of non-leptonic two-body B-meson decays in the heavy-quark limit. The resulting factorization formula incorporates elements of the naive factorization approach and the hard-scattering approach, and allows us to compute systematically radiative ("non-factorizable") corrections to naive factorization for decays such as B → Dπ and B → ππ.

In these lecture notes, I will focus on some of the interesting details of B-meson physics at an Asymmetric collider which are relevant for the study of CP-violating asymmetries. As an instructive example, I will describe the basic experimental tools used in the measurement of sin 2β. In addition, I will describe the use of a blind analysis technique in the measurement of CP asymmetries.

I discuss examples of what Dr. Irving Langmuir, a Nobel prize winner in Chemistry, called "the science of things that aren't so." Some of his examples are reviewed and others from High Energy Physics are added. It is hoped that discussing these incidents will help us develop an understanding of some potential pitfalls.

The Run I experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider discovered the top quark and provided first measurements of many of its properties. Run II (and eventually the LHC and NLC experiments) promise to extend our knowledge of the top quark significantly. Understanding the top quark's large mass, and indeed the origin of all mass, appears to require physics beyond the Standard Model. Thus, the top quark may have unusual properties accessible to upcoming experiments.

Do neutrinos have nonzero masses? If they do, then these masses are very tiny, and can be sought only in very sensitive experiments. The most sensitive of these search for neutrino oscillation, a quantum interference effect which requires neutrino mass and leptonic mixing. In these lectures, we explain what leptonic mixing is, and then develop the physics of neutrino oscillation, including the general formalism and its application to special cases of practical interest. We also see how neutrino oscillation is affected by the passage of the oscillating neutrinos through matter.

This lecture was given at TASI 2000, Flaovor Physics in the New Millennium, July, 2000, Boulder, Colorado. It reviews supersymmetry and emphasizes its flavor physics aspects.

Lecture 1 provides an introduction to dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking. Lectures 2 and 3 give an introduction to compositeness, with emphasis on effective lagrangians, power-counting, and the 't Hooft anomaly-matching conditions.

The prospects for understanding the observed pattern of fermion masses and mixing angles are reviewed. We start with a discussion of the experimental determination of the quark mass matrices and the evidence for approximate "texture zeros". A simple (broken) Abelian symmetry capable of generating the texture zeros and ordering the hierarchical structure of the quark masses and mixing angles is described and ideas for the origin of the hierarchy are discussed. The extension of the family symmetry to include leptons is also discussed paying particular regard to the need to obtain large mixing angles in the neutrino sector. Finally we consider the possibility that the structure of fermion masses results from non-Abelian flavour and family symmetries.

The following sections are included:

• Why extra dimensions?

• Gravity in four-dimensional spacetime

• Kaluza-Klein theory

• Linearized gravity in 5 dimensions

• Kaluza-Klein theory beyond five dimensions

• String theory and extra dimensions

• Large extra dimensions

• Gravity in large extra dimensions

• Collider tests of large extra dimensions

• Randall-Sundrum Theory

• Graviton Modes

• Gravity in a box

• Outlook

• Acknowledgements

• photo