Heavy Quark Symmetry

Abstract

We review the current status of heavy quark symmetry and its applications to weak decays of hadrons containing a single heavy quark. After an introduction to the underlying physical ideas, we discuss in detail the formalism of the heavy quark effective theory, including a comprehensive treatment of symmetry breaking corrections. We then illustrate some nonperturbative approaches, which aim at a dynamical, QCD-based calculation of the universal form factors of the effective theory. The main focus is on results obtained using QCD sum rules. Finally, we perform an essentially model-independent analysis of semileptonic $B$ meson decays in the context of the heavy quark effective theory.