ABSTRACT
Since its discovery, the b quark has brought us two big surprises. The first was the unexpectedly large lifetime. The second was the mass difference between the two mass eigenstates of the Bd meson system which is about 100 times larger than the mass difference in the neutral K meson system. In the presence of new physics, some assumptions made to extract the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) parameters are no longer valid. Indeed, the consistency of the CKM picture with current observations could be accidentally due to numerical cancellation between various effects from new physics. This chapter discusses how B meson decays can be explored at the LHC in order to obtain a better understanding of the CKM picture, and to look for physics bevond the Standard Model. Most of the extensions of the Standard Model introduce new heavy particles.
