The Top Quark Heavy Flavor Physics And Symmetry Breaking

This meeting discussed the experimental results and theoretical aspects in the field of high energy physics, with special reference to the top quark observation, heavy flavor physics and symmetry-breaking mechanisms. The major topics are developed in a series of course lectures.

"This meeting discussed the experimental results and theoretical aspects in the field of high energy physics, with special reference to the top quark observation, heavy flavor physics and symmetry-breaking mechanisms. The major topics are developed in a series of course lectures."--

This volume is a collection of review articles on the most outstanding topics in heavy flavour physics. All the authors have made significant contributions to this field. The book reviews in detail the theoretical structure of heavy flavour physics within the Standard Model and its confrontation with existing experimental data.The physics of the top quark and of the Higgs play an important role in this volume. Beginning with radiative electroweak corrections and their impressive tests at LEP and hadron colliders, the book summarizes the present status of quark mixing, CP violation and rare decays. The dynamics of exclusive D- and B-meson decays, the τ-lepton physics and the newly discovered heavy quark symmetries are discussed in detail. The impact of strong interactions on weak decays is clearly visible in many articles. The physics of heavy flavours at LEP, HERA and hadron colliders constitutes an important part of the book. Another significant topic is the possible role of heavy flavours in the spontaneous symmetry breaking of gauge symmetries. Finally the most recent advances in lattice calculations of the properties of heavy flavours and the lattice studies of the dynamics of heavy flavours are presented.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the phenomenology of heavy flavour physics, those working on the B-factories, LHCb, BTeV, HERA and the Tevatron. It explains how heavy quark theory could be implemented on the lattice, and discusses the status of CP-violation in the neutral kaon system.

This volume is a collection of review articles on the most outstanding topics in heavy flavour physics. All the authors have made significant contributions to this field. The book reviews in detail the theoretical structure of heavy flavour physics and confronts the Standard Model and some of its extensions with existing experimental data.This new edition covers new trends and ideas and includes the latest experimental information. Compared to the previous edition interesting new activities are included and some of the key contributions are updated. Particular attention is paid to the discovery of the top quark and the determination of its mass.

The top quark is by far the heaviest known fundamental particle with a mass nearing that of a gold atom. Because of this strikingly high mass, the top quark has several unique properties and might play an important role in electroweak symmetry breaking—the mechanism that gives all elementary particles mass. Creating top quarks requires access to very high energy collisions, and at present only the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is capable of reaching these energies. Until now, top quarks have only been observed produced in pairs via the strong interaction. At hadron colliders, it should also be possible to produce single top quarks via the electroweak interaction. Studies of single top quark production provide opportunities to measure the top quark spin, how top quarks mix with other quarks, and to look for new physics beyond the standard model. Because of these interesting properties, scientists have been looking for single top quarks for more than 15 years. This thesis presents the first discovery of single top quark production. It documents one of the flagship measurements of the D0 experiment, a collaboration of more than 600 physicists from around the world. It describes first observation of a physical process known as “single top quark production”, which had been sought for more than 10 years before its eventual discovery in 2009. Further, his thesis describes, in detail, the innovative approach Dr. Gillberg took to this analysis. Through the use of Boosted Decision Trees, a machine-learning technique, he observed the tiny single top signal within an otherwise overwhelming background. This Doctoral Thesis has been accepted by Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.

The top quark, when it was finally discovered at Fermilab in 1995 completed the three-generation structure of the Standard Model (SM) and opened up the new field of top quark physics. Viewed as just another SM quark, the top quark appears to be a rather uninteresting species. Produced predominantly, in hadron-hadron collisions, through strong interactions, it decays rapidly without forming hadrons, and almost exclusively through the single mode t 2!Wb. The relevant CKM coupling V{sub tb} is already determined by the (three-generation) unitarity of the CKM matrix. Rare decays and CP violation are unmeasurable small in the SM. Yet the top quark is distinguished by its large mass, about 35 times larger than the mass of the next heavy quark, and intriguingly close to the scale of electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking. This unique property raises a number of interesting questions. Is the top quark mass generated by the Higgs mechanism as the SM predicts and is its mass related to the top-Higgs-Yukawa coupling? Or does it play an even more fundamental role in the EW symmetry breaking mechanism? If there are new particles lighter than the top quark, does the top quark decay into them? Could non-SM physics first manifest itself in non-standard couplings of the top quark which show up as anomalies in top quark production and decays? Top quark physics tries to answer these questions. Several properties of the top quark have already been examined at the Tevatron. These include studies of the kinematical properties of top production, the measurements of the top mass, of the top production cross-section, the reconstruction of t{bar t}pairs in the fully hadronic final states, the study of [tau] decays of the top quark, the reconstruction of hadronic decays of the W boson from top decays, the search for flavor changing neutral current decays, the measurement of the W helicity in top decays, and bounds on t{bar t} spin correlations. Most of these measurements are limited by the small sample of top quarks collected at the Tevatron up to now. The LHC is, in comparison, a top factory, producing about 8 million t{bar t}pairs per experiment per year at low luminosity (10 fb−1/year), and another few million (anti- )tops in EW single (anti- )top quark production. They therefore expect that top quark properties can be examined with significant precision at the LHC. Entirely new measurements can be contemplated on the basis of the large available statistics.

The symposium focused on the following hot topics of particle physics, such as heavy flavor productions and decays; QCD corrections; EW symmetry breaking theories; precise tests of Standard Model and physics beyond Standard Model; CP violation and rare decays etc. There are 30 talks presented at the symposium by participants from all over the world, who are active in the forefront of the fields.