Wednesday 10 May 2017 

Speaker: Dr Tom Latham (Warwick University)


Title: "CP violation in charmless b-hadron decays”

Abstract: Violation of CP symmetry is one of the essential ingredients to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.  
The Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa description of CP violation in the quark sector has been extremely successful, resulting in the award 
of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics to Kobayashi and Maskawa. However, the magnitude of the observed CP violation is insufficient 
to explain the asymmetry of the universe, which implies that additional sources of CP violation are required. Decays of b-hadrons 
to final states containing no charm quarks (so-called "charmless decays") can proceed via loop-level diagrams and so could be 
significantly affected by contributions from as-yet undiscovered heavy particles. Measurements of CP-violating quantities in these 
decays are sensitive probes for such beyond-Standard-Model contributions, in particular when compared with corresponding measurements 
in tree-dominated channels. I present the latest results of CP-violation measurements in charmless decays of b-hadrons and discuss 
their future prospects.