Flavour physics: Status and perspectives

Abstract

The pattern of quark flavour violation predicted by the Standard Model agrees within theoretical and experimental uncertainties with the available data except for a number of intriguing anomalies that require further investigation. In the coming flavour precision era a multitude of new observables will be measured and the accuracy of the measurements of quark flavour violating rare processes and of the relevant lattice QCD calculations will be significantly improved. This will allow us not only to clarify these anomalies but also hopefully to discover new physics (NP). On the other hand a discovery of charged lepton flavour violation and of non‐vanishing electric dipole moments (EDMs) of particles would be a clear signal of NP. Most importantly the unique role of quark and lepton flavour physics and of EDMs in the coming years will be to allow us to get insight into the dynamics well beyond the reach of high energy processes at the LHC. In fact scales as short as 10−21 m (Zeptouniverse) corresponding to energy scale of 200 TeV or even shorter distance scales can be explored in this manner. We discuss the requirements that have to be met for such a flavour expedition to the Zeptouniverse to be successful. In particular we emphasize the power of correlations between flavour observables in the search for NP. In this context the proposed DNA charts allow for a clear distinction between various alternatives for the new dynamics at the LHC scales and at much shorter distance scales. image