Charm Physics

Nobody doubts that the discovery of hadrons with charm of the hidden and open variety – i.e. charmonium as well as D mesons – was instrumental in the acceptance of the Standard Model (SM) in general, and of quarks as physical degrees of freedom, rather than objects of mere mathematical convenience, in particular. Yet charm is all too often viewed as a quantum number with a great past and with no particularly interesting future. This is due to SM predictions of a rather dull electroweak phenomenology of CKM parameters, a low frequency for [Formula: see text] oscillations, tiny (at best) CP asymmetries, and extremely rare flavor changing neutral currents which, in any case, are swamped by huge backgrounds from long-distance dynamics…