CP violation in B-meson decays

The pattern of CP violation in the bottom sector is discussed. We introduce general techniques to expose new CP-violating effects in the cascade decays of B mesons. In the Kobayashi-Maskawa (KM) model, the CP asymmetries so obtained range from 2-20% for plausible values of the model parameters. This is to be compared with the small effects, of order 10^-3-10^-4, previously exhibited within this model. Effects of this size should be observable in upcoming experiments. Our approach stresses the on-shell transitions which make up the cascade decays of heavy mesons to ordinary hadrons, as opposed to the off-shell transitions which occur in the analogs of K^∘-K¯^∘ mixing. The CP asymmetries generated by our techniques are of order δ, where δ is the KM phase angle, and thus represent the maximum effects obtainable in this model.