Minimal Flavour Violation

Abstract

These lectures give a description of models with minimal flavour violation (MFV) that can be tested in $B$ and $K$ meson decays. This class of models can be formulated to a very good approximation in terms of 11 parameters: 4 parameters of the CKM matrix and 7 values of the {\it universal} master functions $F_r$ that parametrize the short distance contributions. In a given MFV model, $F_r$ can be calculated in perturbation theory and are generally correlated with each other but in a model independent analysis they must be considered as free parameters. We conjecture that only 5 or even only 4 of these functions receive significant new physics contributions. We summarize the status of the CKM matrix, outline strategies for the determination of the values of $F_r$ and present a number of relations between physical observables that do not depend on $F_r$ at all. We emphasize that the formulation of MFV in terms of master functions allows to study transparently correlations between $B$ and $K$ decays which is very difficult if Wilson coefficients normalized at low energy scales are used instead. We discuss briefly a specific MFV model: the Standard Model with one universal large extra dimension.