The CKM Matrix and the Heavy Quark Expansion

Abstract

These lectures contain an elementary introduction to heavy quark symmetry and the heavy quark expansion. Applications such as the expansion of heavy meson decay constants and the treatment of inclusive and exclusive semileptonic B decays are included. The use of heavy quark methods for the extraction of |V_cb| and |V_ub| is presented is some detail.

Comments: 49 pages with 10 figures, lectures presented at TASI-2000; manuscript has considerable overlap with hep-ph/9610363