查看文章

The inspiration for this book came from François le Diberder. During his term as spokesperson for B 八 B 八 R he laid down a vision for the two B Factory detector collaborations, B 八 B 八 R and Belle, to work together on a book that would describe the methodologies used and physics results obtained by those experiments. A key ideal emphasized from the outset was that this book should be written from a pedagogical perspective; it should be of interest to the student and expert alike. This vision was presented during a B 八 B 八 R collaboration meeting on the island of Elba in May 2008 and a follow up Belle collaboration meeting at KEK, with visiting colleagues from the B 八 B 八 R collaboration, and was embraced by the community. A number of workshops involving people from the theoretical community as well as the two collaborations were held on four continents over the following years. The resulting book,“The Physics of the B Factories”, is a testament to the way that this concept captured the zeitgeist on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

This book is divided into three parts, the first of which provides a brief description of the B Factories, including a short (though not exhaustive) historical perspective, as well as descriptions of the detectors, ancillary data acquisition systems and data (re) processing systems that were built by the two detector collaborations in the late 1990’s. The second part of the book discusses tools and methods that are frequently used when analyzing the data collected. These range from details of low level reconstruction algorithms and abstract summaries of statistical methods to high level prescriptions used when …