Selected Topics In Discrete Symmetries And Cp Violation Lectures

These lectures provide a basic overview of topics related to the study of CP Violation in B decays. In the first lecture, I review the basics of discrete symmetries in field theories, the quantum mechanics of neutral but flavor-non-trivial mesons, and the classification of three types of CP violation. The actual second lecture which I gave will be separately published as it is my Dirac award lecture and is focused on the separate topic of strong CP Violation. In Lecture 2 here, I cover the Standard Model predictions for neutral B decays, and in particular discuss some channels of interest for CP Violation studies. Lecture 3 reviews the various tools and techniques used to deal with the hadronic physics effects. In Lecture 4, I briefly review the present and planned experiments that can study B decays. I cannot teach all the details of this subject in this short course, so my approach is instead to try to give students a grasp of the relevant concepts and an overview of the available tools. The level of these lectures is introductory. I will provide some references to more detailed treatments and current literature, but this is not a review article so I do not attempt to give complete references to all related literature. By now there are some excellent textbooks that cover this subject in great detail. I refer students to these for more details and for more complete references to the original literature.