Results from the B factories

Abstract

The Babar and Belle experiments at the PEP-II and KEKB B Factories have successfully established CP violation (CPV) in the B sector, proving the validity of the CKM mechanism. An overall integrated luminosity in excess of 1.2 ab−1, corresponding to more than 1.2 billion BB pairs from Υ(4S) decays, is now driving the physics program at the B Factories towards the search of new physics by detecting deviations from the Standard Model (SM) in processes where virtual particles are involved. This approach to new physics searches is in contrast with, and complementary to, searches to be performed at the LHC, where real particles will be hopefully directly detected. Moreover, the B Factories are an abundant source of charmed particles, allowing for the search of neutral meson mixing in the charm sector, as well as of new states which are difficult to explain in terms of quark-antiquark pairs (quarkonia), and which are an ideal and unique laboratory to probe both the high and low energy regimes of QCD. This review shows recent results from Babar and Belle. Section 2 presents the status and prospects of measurements related to the angles and sides of the CKM Unitarity Triangle. Section 3 presents recent evidence of oscillations of neutral D mesons. The current experimental evidences of new states that might be aggregations of more than just a quark-antiquark pair is shown in section 4. Summary and outlook are given in Section 5.