B Factories are particle colliders at which specific subatomic particles - B mesons - are produced abundantly. The purpose is to study the properties of their decays in great detail in order to shed light on a mystery of eminently larger scale: why do we live in a universe composed of anti-matter? This book introduces readers to the physics laws of the CP asymmetry, touching on experimental requirements needed to perform such measurements at the subatomic level, and illustrating the main findings of the contemporary B Factories.

This comprehensive work thoroughly introduces and reviews the set of results from Belle and BaBar - after more than two decades of independent and complementary work - all the way from the detectors and the analysis tools used, up to the physics results, and the interpretation of these results. The world's two giant B Factory collaborations, Belle at KEK and BaBar at SLAC, have successfully completed their main mission to discover and quantify CP violation in the decays of B mesons. CP violation is a necessary requirement to distinguish unambiguously between matter and antimatter. The shared primary objective of the two B Factory experiments was to determine the shape of the so-called unitarity triangle, an abstract triangle representing interactions of quarks, the elementary constituents of matter. The area of the triangle is a measure of the amount of CP violation associated with the weak force. Many other measurements have been performed by the B Factories and are also discussed in this work.

B Factories are particle colliders at which specific subatomic particles - B mesons - are produced abundantly. The purpose is to study the properties of their decays in great detail in order to shed light on a mystery of eminently larger scale: why do we live in a universe composed of anti-matter? This book introduces readers to the physics laws of the CP asymmetry, touching on experimental requirements needed to perform such measurements at the subatomic level, and illustrating the main findings of the contemporary B Factories.