| This dissertation describes the measurement of branching fractions and CP asymmetries in neutral B meson decays to charmless two-body final states of charged pions and kaons. CP violation is a poorly-constrained phenomenon in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and had been studied only in the kaon system before the Babar and Belle experiments. The decay of the neutral B meson to charged pions and kaons is particularly useful for the study of CP violation because they can be related to the Unitarity Triangle angle alpha.; We use an extended maximum likelihood technique that incorporates kinematic, event-shape, and particle identification information to measure the branching fractions of the neutral B meson to pipi, Kpi. These branching fractions are found to be (5.6 +/- 0.4 +/- 0.3) x 10-6 and (19.2 +/- 0.6 +/- 0.6) x 10 -6 respectively. The decay to KK is found to have a branching fraction of less than 0.4 x 10-6 at the 90% confidence level. We also measure the direct CP-violating asymmetry between decays to K+pi- and K-pi+ to be -0.133 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.009. Decay time information and b quark flavor information are then added to determine the time-dependent CP violation parameters S and C, which we find to be -0.30 +/- 0.17 +/- 0.03 and -0.09 +/- 0.15 +/- 0.04, respectively. For all measurements above the first error is statistical and the second is systematic.; The results are obtained from a data sample of 227 million decays of the &Ugr;(4S) to B0 B¯z collected between 1999 and 2004 with the Babar detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B factory located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. |
