Physics at the B Factories: Progress and Prospects Patricia Burchat, Stanford

The BABAR and Belle experiments at the asymmetric-energy "B factories" in California and Japan have each recorded the decays of over 100 million B-meson pairs, charm pairs, and tau pairs.  These data are being used to probe the source of matter-antimatter asymmetries in the quark sector and to search for new physics in the decays of heavy quarks and leptons. They have also yielded some surprises in charm-meson spectroscopy. I will describe some of the highlights of the B factory experiments, and prospects for the future.