  Heavy-flavor physics offers the opportunity to make indirect tests of physics
beyond the Standard Model through precision measurements, and of quantum
chromodynamics (QCD) through particle production studies. The rare decays B0s,
B0 and D0 to dimuon final states are excellent tests of the flavor sector of
the Standard Model and are sensitive to new physics. We report on studies of
these decays and present the first observation of the excited b baryon Xib*0 in
strong decays to Xib and a charged pion, the observation of two Bc meson decay
modes and production properties of the Lambda_b baryon, all performed with the
CMS experiment in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV.
