The narrative of these lectures contains three main threads: (i) CP violation 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 requiring unknown degrees of freedom it can reproduce the known CP phenomenology in a nontrivial way. (ii) The physics of beauty hadrons — in particular their weak decays — opens a novel window onto fundamental dynamics: they usher in a new quark family (presumably the last one); they allow us to determine fundamental quantities of the Standard Model like the b quark mass and the CKM parameters V(cb), V(ub), V(ts) and V(td); they exhibit speedy or even rapid [Formula: see text] oscillations. (iii) Heavy Quark Expansions allow us to treat B decays with an accuracy that would not have been thought possible a mere decade ago. These three threads are joined together in the following manner: (a) Huge CP asymmetries are predicted in B decays, which represents a decisive test of the KM paradigm for CP violation. (b) Some of these predictions are made with high parametric reliability, which (c) 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 High Energy Physics. There will be some other threads woven into this tapestry: electric dipole moments, and CP violation in other strange and in charm decays.
Anomalies in B Decays: A Sign of New Physics?