Kobayashi-Maskawa Model and CP Violation

Presented by Hai-Yang Cheng, Academia Sinica, Taipei

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Yoichiro Nambu for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics and to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for the discovery of the origin of the broken CP symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. In this colloquium we describe the historical background to the KM paper and the experiments performed at B factories that confirm the KM predictions for CP violation. We also discuss the progress toward the understanding of the KM model.