An introduction to the heavy quark effective theory

These lecture notes begin with a brief survey of the physics of heavy quark systems. This discussion motivates the introduction of the Heavy Quark Effective theory (HQET) which captures a great deal of the intuition developed. A derivation of the HQET from QCD is presented as well as an analysis of its special properties. The effective theory can be seen to amount to a one-dimensional field theory in the quark sector. The heavy quark flavour- and spin- symmetry of the effective Lagrangian is an offspring of this. Other topics covered include the question of covariance of the theory, the construction of interpolating fields for the heavy hadron states, the application of LSZ reduction theorems to determine the (reduced) number of form factors in flavour changing transitions, a complete verification of Luke's theorem, plus the matching conditions between QCD and the HQET beyond tree level. These are an expanded version of lectures presented during the Trieste 1994 Summer school on High Energy physics. (author). 47 refs, 7 figs, 1 tab