Minimal flavour violation and beyond: Towards a flavour code for short distance dynamics

Abstract

This decade should provide the first definitive signals of New Physics (NP) beyond the Standard Model (SM) and the goal of these lectures is a review of flavour physics in various extensions of the SM that have been popular in the last ten years. After an overture, two pilot sections and a brief summary of the structure of flavour violation and CP violation in the SM, we will present the theoretical framework for weak decays that will allow us to distinguish between different NP scenarios. Subsequently we will present twelve concrete BSM models summarizing the patterns of flavour violation characteristic for each model. In addition to models with minimal flavour violation (MFV) accompanied by flavour blind phases we will discuss a number of extensions containing non-MFV sources of flavour and CP violation and, in particular, new local operators originating in right-handed charged currents and scalar currents. Next we will address various anomalies in the data as seen from the point of view of the SM that appear very natural in certain extensions of the SM. In this presentation selected superstars of this field will play a very important role. These are processes that are very sensitive to NP effects and which are theoretically clean. Particular emphasis will be put on correlations between various observables that could allow us to distinguish between various NP scenarios. Armed with this knowledge we will propose a coding system in a form of a 3*3 matrix which helps to distinguish between various extensions of the SM. Finding which flavour code is chosen by nature would be an important step towards the fundamental theory of flavour. We give several examples of flavour codes representing specific models.