The coupling of heavy mesons to the pion on the lattice

The QCD non-perturbative effects are among the main sources of uncertainty in our present knowledge of the Standard Model phenomenology. I will present some of the methods which can be used to study these effects, and I will particularly treat the case of lattice QCD. Effective theories can be combined to the lattice approach in order to study the chiral and the heavy quark sectors. I will give some examples of how these properties can be successfully applied to the quark flavour phenomenology. The coupling of heavy mesons to the pion is related to a non-perturbative quantity, noted g-bar, which is required to extract physical results from the effective theory combining both chiral and heavy quark symmetry. This coupling is also involved in the study of the form factors appearing in the heavy to light semi-leptonic decays. These heavy meson decays are used to extract some of the CKM matrix elements which are know, up to now, only with large uncertainties. Moreover, the chiral effects of heavy mesons depend on pion loops whose vertices are precisely the coupling g-bar. These are some of the reasons why the theoretical and experimental determination of this coupling is required. I will present the results of its studies on the lattice and I will compare them to those obtained through several other methods. I will therefore describe these different approaches, their limitations and possible improvements, both from the point of view of the method and of its application to the determination of the coupling g-bar. (author)