EPJ ST Special Issue: b-quark physics as a precision laboratory: status and future prospects

Details

Published on 26 May 2023

Guest Editors: Rusa Mandal (lead editor), B. Ananthanarayan, Daniel Wyler

The proposed collection of articles is to bring together in-depth discussions of the current status of b-quark physics as well as of the prospects for the future.

The mass of the b-quark and its small decay rate have made it eminently suitable for studying the strong and the weak interactions. On one hand, the mass is high enough to allow reliable perturbative calculations of the strong interaction, due to the onset of asymptotic freedom, to have led to successful effective theories (HQET, SCET) and also to allow decays with a large number of final states. On the other hand, it is low enough to have led to the further development of various methods to handle the strong interactions at low energies, such as aspects of chiral perturbation theory or lattice methods. The small rate, due to the CKM suppression factors, makes it ideal for studies of the weak interactions, in particular the rare decays and CP violating effects. Most importantly, this has led to a solid basis for understanding CP violation, and the entire CKM mixing matrix. Before the advent of the higher energies available at LHC, B-physics indeed dominated phenomenological activities in particle physics. Today, there is intensive work at the LHCb-detector, at CERN, and at the Belle-II-detector, Tsukuba Japan.

These activities have indeed led to numerous puzzles where theory and experiment did not agree, including in lifetimes, angular distributions, the extraction of CKM matrix elements and, most recently, deviations from lepton universality. This has led to renewed work, both in theory and experiment and in fact many of the puzzles are on the verge of disappearing, raising the stakes even higher.

Several expert theorists and experimentalists have already agreed to contribute to this collection. Should you feel that there are important aspects missing from the proposed contents, and that you wish to contribute, you are welcome to contact the lead editor to get an idea as to whether the contribution could find room in the collection.

Guest Editors:

Dr. Rusa Mandal (lead guest editor), Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar - 382055 Gujarat, India (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )

Prof. B. Ananthanarayan, Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India

Prof. Daniel Wyler, Physik Institut, Universitaet Zürich, Winterthurerstr. 190, CH 8057 Zürich, Switzerland

Manuscripts should be prepared following the Submission Guidelines.

Open Access: EPJ ST is a hybrid journal offering Open Access publication via the Open Choice programme and a growing number of Transformative Agreements which enable authors to publish OA at no direct cost (all costs are paid centrally).