Charm and Beauty of CP Violation

Alexey Petrov

Department of Physics

Wayne State University

One of the major puzzles at the intersection of particle physics and cosmology is the asymmetry between matter and antimatter: the Universe contains significant amounts of matter, but almost no antimatter! The puzzle is how this can possibly occur when the laws of physics for matter and antimatter are very close to identical.

Studies of particles containing the "b" ("beauty") and "c" (charm) quark can shed light on this question. I will discuss why those systems are well suited for CP violation studies and how current experiments probe the fundamental mechanism for the violation of CP symmetry and search for glimpses of New Physics.