Heavy quark expansion in beauty and its decays

Nikolai Uraltsev

Published 1998-04-12, updated 1998-04-18Version 2

I give an introduction to the QCD-based theory of the heavy flavor hadrons and their weak decays. Trying to remain at the next-to-elementary level and skip technicalities, I concentrate on the qualitative description of the most important applications and physical meaning of the theoretical statements. The numerical results of the dedicated theoretical analyses of extracting V_cb are given and the possibilities to determine V_ub in future are discussed. At the same time I describe in simple language subtle peculiarities distinguishing actual QCD of heavy quarks from naive quantum mechanical treatment often applied to heavy flavor hadrons. These subtleties are often mistreated. Particular attention is paid to the concept of the heavy quark mass and its evaluation, to the kinetic operator and the question of the 1/m_Q corrections to inclusive widths of heavy flavor hadrons. I argue that the properly defined b quark mass is known with a good accuracy from the \bar{b} b threshold cross section.