Abstract
"The Physics of the B Factories" describes a decade long effort of physicists in the quest for the precise determination of asymmetry - broken symmetry - between particles and anti-particles. We now recognize that the matter we see around us is the residue - one part in a billion - of the matter and antimatter that existed in the early universe, most of which annihilated into the cosmic background radiation that bathes us.
But the question remains: how did the baryonic matter-antimatter asymmetry arise? This book describes the work done by some 1000 physicists and engineers from around the globe on two experimental facilities built to test our understanding of this phenomenon, one at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, USA, and a second at the KEK Laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan, and what we have learned from them in broadening our understanding of nature.