Theoretical Overview: The New Mesons

After commenting on the state of contemporary hadronic physics and spectroscopy, I highlight four areas where the action is: searching for the relevant degrees of freedom, mesons with beauty and charm, chiral symmetry and the D_{sJ} levels, and X(3872) and the lost tribes of charmonium.Comment: 10 pages, uses jpconf.cls; talk at First Meeting of the APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physic

Production and propagation of heavy hadrons in air-shower simulators

Very energetic charm and bottom hadrons may be produced in the upper atmosphere when a primary cosmic ray or the leading hadron in an extensive air shower collide with a nucleon. At $E\approx 10^8$ GeV their decay length becomes of the order of 10 km, implying that they tend to interact in the air instead of decaying. Since the inelasticity in these collisions is much smaller than the one in proton and pion collisions, there could be rare events where a heavy-hadron component transports a significant amount of energy deep into the atmosphere. We have developed a module for the detailed simulation of these processes and have included it in a new version of the air shower simulator AIRES. We study the frequency, the energy distribution and the depth of charm and bottom production, as well as the depth and the energy distribution of these quarks when they decay. As an illustration, we consider the production and decay of tau leptons (from $D_s$ decays) and the lepton flux at PeV energies from a 30 EeV proton primary. The proper inclusion of charm and bottom hadrons in AIRES opens the possibility to search for air-shower observables that are sensitive to heavy quark effects.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

B Physics at the TeVatron

The CDF and D\O\ experiments at the Tevatron $p\bar{p}$ collider established that extensive and detailed exploration of the $b$--quark dynamics is possible in hadron collisions, with results competitive and supplementary to those from $e^+e^-$ colliders. This provides a rich, and highly rewarding program that is currently reaching full maturity. I report a few recent world-leading results on rare decays, CP-violation in $B^0_s$ mixing, $b\to s$ penguin decays, and charm physics.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, proceedings for IFAE2011. To be published in the Nuovo Cimento C - Colloquia on Physic

Recent results on Charm Physics from Fermilab

New high statistics, high resolution fixed target experiments producing $10^5$ - $10^6$ fully reconstructed charm particles are allowing a detailed study of the charm sector. Recent results on charm quark production from Fermilab fixed target experiments E791, SELEX and FOCUS are presented.Comment: 27 pages, corrected some typographical errors. To appear Proc. VII Mexican Workshop of Particles and Field, Merida Yuc. M\'ex., Nov. 199