Physics with b-quarks

The lengths of the sides of the unitarity triangle and the interior angles can be determined from measurements of weak hadronic processes that involve s- and b-quarks. Processes involving b-hadrons are particularly sensitive. To extract the relevant CKM information, good theoretical understanding of the strong interaction physics is required. This problem is a particular specialty of Professor Falk.

The current determination of the unitarity triangle is shown below. It is clear that the all measurements are consistent with the yellow shaded region and that CP violation within the Standard Model is definitely established. An important recent constraint on the unitarity triangle has come from Professor Gritsan
's study of CP-violating asymmetries in the decays of B-mesons to pairs of vector meson daughters which determines the upper vertex angle alpha. Gritsan is leading the effort in the BaBar Collaboration to improve the determination of alpha and to see if this consistent picture remains.

Note that the poorly known Bs mixing parameter Delta-ms does not yet provide much information but could potentially provide an interesting constraint. This measurement is currently being pursued by the JHU CDF group.