The Physics of the B Factories

This comprehensive work thoroughly introduces and reviews the set of results from Belle and BaBar - after more than two decades of independent and complementary work - all the way from the detectors and the analysis tools used, up to the physics results, and the interpretation of these results.

The world’s two giant B Factory collaborations, Belle at KEK and BaBar at SLAC, have successfully completed their main mission to discover and quantify CP violation in the decays of B mesons. CP violation is a necessary requirement to distinguish unambiguously between matter and antimatter. The shared primary objective of the two B Factory experiments was to determine the shape of the so-called unitarity triangle, an abstract triangle representing interactions of quarks, the elementary constituents of matter. The area of the triangle is a measure of the amount of CP violation associated with the weak force.

Many other measurements have been performed by the B Factories and are also discussed in this work.

• B-Factories
• B-Factory Collaborations
• BaBar and Belle Experiments
• Baryon Asymmetry
• CKM Matrix and Unitarity Triangle
• CP Violation in B-meson Systems

• School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

  Adrian Bevan

• Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

  Bostjan Golob

• Theoretische Physik I, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

  Thomas Mannel

• Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, USA

  Soeren Prell

• School of Physics, University of Sidney, Sidney, Australia

  Bruce Yabsley

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