CP Violation - A Brief Review

Abstract

Some past, present, and future aspects of CP violation are reviewed. The discrete symmetries C, P, and T are introduced with an example drawn from Maxwell's Equations. The history of the discovery of CP violation in the kaon system is described briefly, and brought up-to-date with a review of recent results on kaon decays. The candidate theory of CP violation, based on phases in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, will be tested by studies of $B$ mesons, both in decays to CP eigenstates and in ``direct'' decays; we will soon learn a great deal more about whether the CKM picture is self-consistent. Future measurements are noted and some brief remarks are made about the ``other'' manifestation of CP violation, the baryon asymmetry of the Universe.