Effective field theory and weak non-leptonic interactions

The techniques of Ovrut and Schnitzer (1981) are used to calculate the finite decoupling renormalisation constants resulting from heavy fermion decoupling in a non-abelian gauge theory exhibiting broken flavour symmetry. The results of this calculation are applied to realistic, massive QCD. The decoupling information may be absorbed into renormalisation group (R.G.) invariants. Working in the Landau gauge R.G. invariants are derived for the running coupling constants and running quark masses of effective QCD in the modified minimal subtraction scheme (for effective QCD with 3 to 8 flavours). This work is then applied to the major part of the thesis; a complete derivation of the effective weak non-leptonic sector of the standard model (SU(3)/sub c/ x SU(2) x U(1)), that is the construction of all effective weak non-leptonic Hamiltonians resulting from the standard model when all quark generations above the third along with the W and Z are explicitily decoupled. The form of decoupling in the work of Gilman and Wise (1979) has been adopted. The weak non-leptonic sector naturally decomposes into flavour changing and flavour conserving sectors relative to anomalous dimension calculations. The flavour changing sector further decomposes into penguin free and penguin generating sectors. Individual analyses of these three sectors are given. All sectors are analysed uniformly, based upon a standard model with n generations