The Heavy Quark Expansion

Abstract

I review the status of the modern theoretical approach to weak decays of heavy flavor hadrons based on the 1/m_Q expansion in QCD. The qualitative features are explained and the subtleties in simultaneously incorporating perturbative and power-suppressed effects are addressed. A few topical phenomenological applications are discussed in quantitative detail.

Comments: 30 pages, 3 figures in the text; LaTeX. Talk given at the Symposium on Radiative Corrections (CRAD96), Cracow, 1-5 August 1996. To appear in Proceedings of "CRAD96"