B_d and B_s mixing: mass and width differences and CP violation

Abstract

B-B-bar mixing involves three physical parameters: the magnitudes of the off-diagonal elements of the mass and decay matrices and their relative phase. They are related to the mass and width differences between the mass eigenstates and to the CP asymmetry in flavour-specific decays, a_fs. Introducing a new operator basis I present new, more precise theory predictions for the width differences in the B_s and B_d systems: in the Standard Model one finds Delta Gamma_s = 0.088 +/- 0.017 ps^{-1} and Delta Gamma_d = (26.7 +5.8/-6.5) * 10^{-4} ps^{-1}. Updates of the mass differences Delta M_d and Delta M_s and of a_{fs}^d and a_{fs}^s are also presented. Then I discuss how various present and future measurements can be combined to constrain new physics. The extraction of a new CP phase phi_s^Delta from data on a_{fs}^s also profits from our new operator basis. Confronting our new formulae with D0 data we find that sin phi_s^Delta deviates from zero by 2 sigma.