Flavor Physics in the Quark Sector

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent experimental and theoretical progress in quark flavor physics, focusing on CP violation and decay measurements in mesons, and discusses future experimental prospects for testing the Standard Model.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of current experimental results and their implications for the Standard Model, highlighting recent advances and future directions in quark flavor physics.

Findings

Detailed measurements of meson decays and CP violation.

Progress in testing Standard Model predictions.

Preparation for next-generation experiments.

Abstract

One of the major challenges of particle physics has been to gain an in-depth understanding of the role of quark flavor and measurements and theoretical interpretations of their results have advanced tremendously: apart from masses and quantum numbers of flavor particles, there now exist detailed measurements of the characteristics of their interactions allowing stringent tests of Standard Model predictions. Among the most interesting phenomena of flavor physics is the violation of the CP symmetry that has been subtle and difficult to explore. Till early 1990s observations of CP violation were confined to neutral $K$ mesons, but since then a large number of CP-violating processes have been studied in detail in neutral $B$ mesons. In parallel, measurements of the couplings of the heavy quarks and the dynamics for their decays in large samples of $K, D$, and $B$ mesons have been greatly improved in accuracy and the results are being used as probes in the search for deviations from the Standard Model. In the near future, there will be a transition from the current to a new generation of experiments, thus a review of the status of quark flavor physics is timely. This report summarizes the results of the current generation of experiments that is about to be completed and it confronts these results with the theoretical understanding of the field.