Semileptonic Decays of D and B Mesons

We report results of our ongoing investigation concerning semileptonic decays of heavy pseudoscalar mesons into pseudoscalar and vector mesons. Particular attention is paid to uncertainties in the $q^2$ and the heavy quark mass dependence of formfactors. Moreover we present a non-perturbative test to the LMK current renormalization scheme for vector current transition matrix elements and find remarkable agreement.Comment: 3 pages, uuencoded, contribution to Lat 9

The confining string and its breaking in QCD

We point out that the world sheet swept by the confining string in presence of dynamical quarks can belong to two different phases, depending on the number of charge species and the quark masses. When it lies in the normal phase (as opposed to the tearing one) the string breaking is invisible in the Wilson loop, while is manifest in operators composed of disjoint sources, as observed in many numerical experiments. We work out an explicit formula for the correlator of Polyakov loops at finite temperature, which is then compared with recent lattice data, both in the quenched case and in presence of dynamical quarks. The analysis in the quenched case shows that the free bosonic string model describes accurately the data for distances larger than ~ 0.75 fm. In the unquenched case we derive predictions on the dependence of the static potential on the temperature which are compatible with the lattice data.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX with 4 eps figures (included