Professor Kay Kinoshita
Department of Physics,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
4 PM, Thursday, Feb. 12, 1998
Room 101, Olin Physical Laboratory
According to the current understanding of the particles and fields known as the Standard Model, there are three generations of particles, groupings which follow a fixed pattern and differ from each other only in the masses of the member particles. The existence of three generations is sufficient to provide for the experimentally observed violation of CP symmetry and predicts specific relationships, including CP-nonconserving ones, in the weak interactions between the quarks of the three generations. To verify that the three-generation model is the sole source of CP asymmetry requires the detailed measurement of several such relationships. The weak decay of the b or beauty quark, the lighter quark of the third generation, is one of the most straightforward ways to access them. Several are measured with the CLEO II detector, where pairs of the lightest mesons containing the b-quark are born of e+e- annihilations near the mass threshold, at the resonance known as the Y(4S).