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. This book presents theoretical tools necessary to understand this phenomenon. Reflecting the explosion of new results over the last decade, this second edition has been substantially expanded. It introduces charge conjugation, parity and time reversal, before describing the Kobayashi-Maskawa (KM) theory for CP violation and our understanding of CP violation in kaon decays. It reveals how the discovery of B mesons has provided a new laboratory to study CP violation with KM theory predicting large asymmetries, and discusses how these predictions have been confirmed since the first edition of this book. Later chapters describe the search for a new theory of nature’s fundamental dynamics. This book is suitable for researchers in high energy, atomic and nuclear physics, and the history and philosophy of science.

Author Biography

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, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, SLAC and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is a former scholarship student of the Maximilianeum 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 PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey, he taught and researched at Columbia University, New York, Fermilab and Rockefeller University, New York. In 1992, after 34 years in the US, he went to Japan as a professor of physics at Nagoya University, Japan. He is now the chairman of the physics department. 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.