Advances in the Physics of Particles and Nuclei – serie

More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. The present extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, an outlook on top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider is given.

a R. Fleischer, T. Hurth, M. L. Mangano Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland In the history of quantum and particle physics, discrete system. In this past decade, the key player has been the B-meson system, and we also witnessed the appearance on symmetries and their violation have played an outstanding + ? rôle. First, the assumption of the conservation of P (parity), stage of the top quark. Thanks to thee e B factories with C (charge conjugation), CP and CPT (T denotes time rever- their detectors BaBar (SLAC) and Belle (KEK), CP vio- tion is now also rmly seen in B-meson decays, where the sal) helped theorists to restrict theoretical predictions, such 0 “golden” decay B ?J/?K shows CP-violating effects as in Fermi’s 1934 seminal paper on weak interactions. In S d at the level of 70%. These effects can be translated into the 1957, the observation of P (and C) violation in weak int- angle? of the “unitarity triangle” (UT), which characterizes actions gave a new impact and led to the conjecture that CP the Kobayashi–Maskawa mechanism of CP violation. S- was still a conserved symmetry. In 1963, one year before + ? eral strategies to determine the other angles of the triangle, the surprising observation of CP violation in K ?? ? L ? and ?, have been proposed and successfully applied to decays, the concept of quark- avour mixing was introduced theB-factory data.

The series Advances in the Physics of Particles and Nuclei (APPN) is devoted to the archiving, in printed high-quality book format, of the comprehensive, long shelf-life reviews published in The European Physical Journal A and C. APPN will be of benefit in particular to those librarians and research groups, who have chosen to have only electronic access to these journals. Occasionally, original material in review format and refereed by the series' editorial board will also be included. This volume contains the following four reviews:C.E. DeTar and U.M. Heller: QCD Thermodynamics from the LatticeB.R. Holstein: Hadronic Parity violation and Effective Field TheoryM. Signore and D. Puy: Cosmic Microwave Background and First Molecules in the Early UniverseS. Bethke: The 2009 World Average of alphas

More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. The present extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, an outlook on top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider is given.

a R. Fleischer, T. Hurth, M. L. Mangano Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland In the history of quantum and particle physics, discrete system. In this past decade, the key player has been the B-meson system, and we also witnessed the appearance on symmetries and their violation have played an outstanding + ? rôle. First, the assumption of the conservation of P (parity), stage of the top quark. Thanks to thee e B factories with C (charge conjugation), CP and CPT (T denotes time rever- their detectors BaBar (SLAC) and Belle (KEK), CP vio- tion is now also rmly seen in B-meson decays, where the sal) helped theorists to restrict theoretical predictions, such 0 “golden” decay B ?J/?K shows CP-violating effects as in Fermi’s 1934 seminal paper on weak interactions. In S d at the level of 70%. These effects can be translated into the 1957, the observation of P (and C) violation in weak int- angle? of the “unitarity triangle” (UT), which characterizes actions gave a new impact and led to the conjecture that CP the Kobayashi–Maskawa mechanism of CP violation. S- was still a conserved symmetry. In 1963, one year before + ? eral strategies to determine the other angles of the triangle, the surprising observation of CP violation in K ?? ? L ? and ?, have been proposed and successfully applied to decays, the concept of quark- avour mixing was introduced theB-factory data.

The series Advances in the Physics of Particles and Nuclei (APPN) is devoted to the archiving, in printed high-quality book format, of the comprehensive, long shelf-life reviews published in The European Physical Journal A and C. APPN will be of benefit in particular to those librarians and research groups, who have chosen to have only electronic access to these journals. Occasionally, original material in review format and refereed by the series’ editorial board will also beincluded. This volume contains the following two reviews:Nora Brambilla et al.: Heavy Quarkonium: Progress, Puzzles and Opportunities Daniel Wicke: Properties of the Top Quark

The series Advances in the Physics of Particles and Nuclei (APPN) is devoted to the archiving, in printed high-quality book format, of the comprehensive, long shelf-life reviews published in The European Physical Journal A and C. APPN will be of benefit in particular to those librarians and research groups, who have chosen to have only electronic access to these journals. Occasionally, original material in review format and refereed by the series’ editorial board will also beincluded. This volume contains the following two reviews:Nora Brambilla et al.: Heavy Quarkonium: Progress, Puzzles and Opportunities Daniel Wicke: Properties of the Top Quark