Final Report Summary - NPFLAVOUR (The Flavour of New Physics)
The Standard Model (SM) of electroweak and strong interactions, supplemented by neutrino masses, provides an extremely successful description of an impressive amount of experimental data in elementary particle physics. However, while the LHC has discovered the last missing piece of the SM, namely the Higgs boson, responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, the origin of flavour symmetry breaking remains largely unknown, as well as the nature of the Higgs boson (elementary or composite) and the mechanism stabilizing the electroweak scale. While the LHC did not reveal any new particle up to the TeV scale, it collected an impressive amount of data in the Higgs and flavour sectors. This experimental information formed the basis for the present project, which achieved the following main goals: i) improving the theoretical accuracy of currently measured flavour observables to match or exceed the experimental accuracy; ii) developing the theoretical tools needed to fully exploit experimental data in the flavour and electroweak sectors, implementing state-of-the art calculations in a consistent framework within the SM, in several NP models and in a model-independent Standard Model Effective Theory; iii) paving the road to identifying the scale of New Physics and its nature, by obtaining the best possible limits on New Physics contributions to measured observables, and by carefully assessing the theoretical uncertainties involved in the current exciting discrepancies between SM predictions and experimental data in rare and semileptonic B decays.