Heavy Flavor Theory: Overview

An introduction to the heavy quark effective theory and its symmetries is given. Some implications of the heavy quark spin and flavor symmetries are discussed. Recent results on fragmentation to quarkonium states are reviewed.Comment: 25 pages, phyzzx, CALT-68-1901, Talk given at the Lepton Photon Conferenc

The b-quark and Symmetries of the Strong Interaction

Applications of HQET and NRQCD to fragmentation are briefly reviewed. The special role of the b-quark in applications of heavy quark symmetry is discussed. Predictions of HQET for semileptonic B decays to excited charmed mesons are considered.Comment: 8 pages, Talk presented at the Twenty Beautiful Years of Bottom Physics Symposium, Chicago, IL, 1997. Discussion of fragmentation parameters is improve

Dedication to Nathan Isgur

Nathan passed away in July after a lengthy illness. I am sure most of you are familiar with his many contributions to heavy quark physics and it is certainly fitting that we take a few minutes to honor him at the beginning of this meeting. Actually Nathan's main physics interest was the strong interactions rather than heavy quark physics per se. He was already very well known for work he did with Gabriel Karl and others on the nonrelativistic quark model before the work that he did on heavy quark symmetry and its applications. However, Nathan understood the limitations of the nonrelativistic quark model, and was thrilled that the methods he helped develop allowed one to derive systematically from the theory of the strong interactions many properties of hadrons that contain a heavy quark