Introduction to Heavy Meson Decays and Cp Asymmetries

These lectures are intended to provide an introduction to heavy meson decays and CP violation. The first lecture contains a brief review of the standard model and how the CKM matrix and CP violation arise, mixing and CP violation in neutral meson systems, and explanation of the cleanliness of the sin 2β measurement. The second lecture deals with the heavy quark limit, some applications of heavy quark symmetry and the operator product expansion for exclusive and inclusive semileptonic B decays. The third lecture concerns with theoretically clean CP violation measurements that may become possible in the future, and some developments toward a better understanding of nonleptonic B decays. The conclusions include a subjective best buy list for the near future. Lectures given at the 30th SLAC Summer Institute on Particle Physics: Secrets of the B Meson SLAC, Menlo Park, California, August 5–16, 2002