Is Super-$B$ Sufficiently Superb? -- On the Motivation for a Super-$B$ Factory

Abstract

Despite the great success of the $\Upsilon (4S)$ $B$ factories at KEK and SLAC and the guaranteed addition of high sensitivity measurements on beauty decays to be performed at the Tevatron and LHC, a strong case can be made for an $e^+e^-$ Super-$B$ factory yielding data samples of order $10^{10}$ $B \bar B$ pairs as a necessity rather than luxury. It has to be justified through its ability to not only establish deviations from the Standard Model, but also diagnose and interpret those in terms of specific features of the New Dynamics. The role to be played by a Super-$B$ factory is thus analogous {\em and even in parallel} to that of a linear collider. The latter's goal is to provide more detailed information on previously discovered New Physics involved in the electroweak phase transition. Likewise a Super-$B$ factory would provide precision probes for analyzing whether such New Dynamics has an impact on heavy flavour dynamics -- a need particularly manifest if the New Physics is housed under the `big tent' of SUSY. The huge statistics of a Super-$B$ factory and the comprehensive body of accurate measurements uniquely possible there would be harnessed in several classes of studies, among them more precise extractions of $V(ub)/V(cb)$ and $V(td)/V(ts)$, more detailed analyses of $B\to \gamma X_{s,d}, l^+l^-X$ and novel data on $B\to \tau \nu, \tau \nu D, \nu \bar \nu X$ and maybe even on $\Upsilon (5S) \to B_s \bar B_s$ -- all in addition to a host of CP asymmetries.