Heavy Quark Lifetimes, Mixing and CP Violation

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in heavy quark physics, including charm lifetime measurements, searches for charm mixing, Bs mixing constraints, and initial CP violation measurements in B decays, highlighting progress and future prospects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental results in heavy quark physics, emphasizing new measurements and their implications for understanding quark mixing and CP violation.

Findings

Charm lifetime measurements improve decay mechanism understanding.

New limits on Bs mixing constrain the unitarity triangle.

Initial measurements of CP violation in B decays are reported.

Abstract

This paper emphasizes four topics that represent some of the year's highlights in heavy quark physics. First of all, a review is given of charm lifetime measurements and how they lead to better understanding of the mechanisms of charm decay. Secondly, the CLEO collaboration's new search for charm mixing is reported, which significantly extends the search for new physics in that sector. Thirdly, important updates in Bs mixing are summarized, which result in a new limit on the mass difference, and which further constrain the unitarity triangle. Finally, the first efforts to measure CP violation in the B system are discussed. Results are shown for the CDF and ALEPH measurements of sin(2beta), as well as the CLEO branching fraction measurements of B-->Kpi,pipi, which have implications for future measurements of alpha.