B, D and K decays

The present report documents the results of Working Group 2: B, D and K decays, of the workshop on Flavor in the Era of the LHC, held at CERN from November 2005 through March 2007. With the advent of the LHC, we will be able to probe New Physics (NP) up to energy scales almost one order of magnitude larger than it has been possible with present accelerator facilities. While direct detection of new particles will be the main avenue to establish the presence of NP at the LHC, indirect searches will provide precious complementary information, since most probably it will not be possible to measure the full spectrum of new particles and their couplings through direct production. In particular, precision measurements and computations in the realm of flavor physics are expected to play a key role in constraining the unknown parameters of the Lagrangian of any NP model emerging from direct searches at the LHC. The aim of Working Group 2 was twofold: on the one hand, to provide a coherent up-to-date picture of the status of flavor physics before the start of the LHC; on the other hand, to initiate activities on the path towards integrating information on NP from high-pT and flavor data. This report is organized as follows: in Sect. 1, we give an overview of NP models, focusing on a few examples that have been discussed in some detail during the workshop, with a short description of the available computational tools for flavor observables in NP models. Section 2 contains a concise discussion of the main theoretical problem in flavor physics: the evaluation of the relevant hadronic matrix elements for weak decays. Section 3 contains a detailed discussion of NP effects in a set of flavor observables that we identified as "benchmark channels" for NP searches. The experimental prospects for flavor physics at future facilities are discussed in Sect. 4. Finally, Sect. 5 contains some assessments on the work done at the workshop and the prospects for future developments.