# Flavor Physics

## Course description

The course is held in the first half of the spring semester 2017. It takes place on Tuesdays (February 21 - April 11) from 14-16 in room 119.

The study of B Meson decays is an active research topic in elementary particle physics, both in experiment and theory. By confronting experimental and theoretical results, several parameters of the standard model (SM )Lagrangian can be determined, in particular the Cabibbo-Kobajashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix.

An important class of B-meson decays are the so-called rare decays, which by definition are induced in the SM only at the one-loop level. As such, they are particularly sensitive to physics beyond the SM.

The first four lectures will be given by Christoph Greub. We will first briefly review the part of the SM which is relevant for flavor physics. Then we will look at inclusive tree-level decays (including QCD corrections). Then we will discuss the effective theory formulation of B decays (effective Hamiltonian formalism, matching, renormalization group equations and all that). We will apply these techniques for rare inclusive B-decays.

Javier Virto will then give four lectures on exclusive B-meson decays and their application for the extraction of SM parameters and searches for new physics. We will start with a classification of the different processes, and explain the techniques necessary for the calculation of the amplitudes in each case, having in mind that we are dealing with hadronic processes, where non-perturbative effects are important. These amplitudes will then be used in a few phenomenological applications, including the understanding of the current anomalies in b → s exclusive transitions.