Weak decays of heavy mesons in the static quark approximation

When one or more quarks are heavy compared to hadronic scales, some new symmetries appear in the low energy effective lagrangian for QCD. We exploit these static quark symmetries to derive model-independent normalizations of some weak hadronic matrix elements involving heavy quarks, as well as many relationships between such matrix elements. We briefly discuss how some of these conditions can be used to improve determinations of Kobayashi-Maskawa angles. (orig.)