Flavor in the Era of the LHC ─ Reports of the CERN Working Groups

The series Advances in the Physics of Particles and Nuclei (APPN) is devoted to the archiving, in printed high-quality book format, of the comprehensive, long shelf-life reviews published in The European Physical Journal A and C. APPN will be of benefit in particular to those librarians and research groups, who have chosen to have only electronic access to these journals. Occasionally, original material in review format and refereed by the series' editorial board will also be included. The three reviews collected in this volume summarize and document the outcome of the year long work by the CERN working groups studying the role of flavor physics in the era of the LHC. They confirm that flavor physics is an essential element in the future of high-energy physics. Should new-physics particles be produced at the LHC, studies of flavor physics will play a key role, helping to find the underlying new-physics scenario, to study the properties of new-physics particles and to detect or to exclude new sources of CP violation and flavor structures.