The 2009 Kaon International Conference (KAON09) was held at the Tsukuba International Congress Center, EPOCHAL TSUKUBA, located at the heart of the Tsukuba city, from June 9, Tuesday to 12, Friday. "KAON" is a series of conferences on the physics of K-meson — also called kaon — decay and related topics, and is held every few years. Both experimental and theoretical studies of Kaon physics have been very active since 1964, when CP violation was observed in the decay process of neutral Kaons for the first time. This discovery later inspired Kobayashi and Maskawa to introduce the third generation of quark family. The conference was attended by 69 researchers including 35 from abroad, presenting 42 invited talks during the plenary sessions and 12 contributed papers for the poster session. In addition, the participants took a bus tour to the J-PARC site in the afternoon of June 11.
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The conference started with the keynote talks by Professor C.S. Lim of Kobe University and Professor P. Boyle of University of Edinburgh. Prof. Lim explained the pioneering research with Professor Takeo Inami, now at Chuo University, in 1981 on the effects of heavy quarks to rare Kaon decays, or what is known as 'Inami-Lim loop functions'. Prof. Boyle reviewed the recent theoretical development in Kaon decays using lattice gauge theory. During the conference, topics such as CP and T violation, Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, Rare decays, Lepton universality, test of CPT and Quantum Mechanics, Lattice gauge theory, Chiral perturbation theory, and physic beyond the Standard Model were discussed. Recent results from Kaon experiments such as KLOE at Frascati, NA48/NA62 at CERN and ISTRA+ at Protvino in Europe, E949 at BNL and KTeV at Fermilab in the United States, and E391a at KEK in Japan, were reported. The prospects in Kaon physics and the R&D works for detectors and beamlines, including the new KOTO and TREK experiments at J-PARC, were also discussed. In the last session titled 'Prospects for Flavor Physics and the role of Kaon decays', Professor G. Colangelo of University of Bern and Professor Y. Okada of KEK summarized the precise tests of the Standard Model, and the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model in Kaon physics.
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