Precision physics with heavy-flavoured hadrons

Abstract

The understanding of flavour dynamics is one of the key aims of elementary particle physics. The last 15 years have witnessed the triumph of the Kobayashi-Maskawa mechanism, which describes all flavour changing transitions of quarks in the Standard Model. This important milestone has been reached owing to a series of experiments, in particular to those operating at the so-called $B$ factories, at the Tevatron, and now at the LHC. We briefly review status and perspectives of flavour physics, highlighting the results where the LHC has given the most significant contributions, notably including the recent observation of the $B_s^0\to\mu^+\mu^-$ decay