Cp violation and beauty decays - A case study of high impact, high sensitivity and even high precision physics

The narrative of these lectures contains three main threads: (i) CP violati on despite having so far been observed only in the decays of neutral kaons has been recognized as a phenomenon of truly fundamental importance. The KM ansatz, constitutes the minimal implementation of CP violation: without re quiring unknown degrees of freedom it can reproduce the known CP phenomenol ogy in a nontrivial way. (ii) The physics of beauty hadrons - in particular their weak decays - opens a novel window onto fundamental dynamics: they u sher in a new quark family (presumably the last one); they allow us to dete rmine fundamental quantities of the Standard Model like the b quark mass an d the CKM parameters V(cb), V(ub), V(ts) and V(td); they exhibit speedy or even rapid B-o - (B) over bar(o) oscillations. (iii) Heavy Quark Expansions allow us to treat B decays with an accuracy that would not have been thoug ht possible a mere decade ago. These three threads are joined together in t he following manner: (a) Huge CP asymmetries are predicted in B decays, whi ch represents a decisive test of the KM paradigm for CP violation. (b) Some of these predictions are made with high parametric reliability, which Ic) can be translated into numerical precision through the judicious employment of novel theoretical technologies. (d) Beauty decays thus provide us with a rich and promising field to search for New Physics and even study some of its salient features. At the end of it there might quite possibly be a New Paradigm for Nigh Energy Physics. There will be some other threads woven i nto this tapestry: electric dipole moments, and CP violation in other stran ge and in charm decays.