The book constitutes a compact review of the applications of effective field theory methods in flavour physics, with emphasis on heavy quark physics. Some of the relevant applications are discussed to illustrate the method.

It covers the full range of theoretical tools related to the application of the effective field theory idea: Starting from the weak interactions as an effective theory derived from the standard model, well-established methods such as heavy quark effective theory, the heavy quark mass expansion and chiral perturbation theory are addressed. Also more recent ideas such as QCD factorization and soft collinear effective theory are outlined.

Finally the standard model itself is viewed as an effective theory, allowing a model-independent look at the results of the new physics. The book should be useful for the advanced graduate student as well as for scientists who are interested in the theoretical toolkit used in the context of flavour physics. It is not meant as a complete review of the subject, rather it should be useful as an introduction to the basic ideas.

This volume covers the main topics in heavy flavour physics in a comprehensive yet accessible way. The material is presented as a combination of extensive introductory lectures and more typical contributions. This book will benefit postgraduate students and reseachers alike.

The book collects a few articles on QCD and heavy quarks by close colleagues and friends of Prof. Dr. Nikolai Uraltsev, who passed away early and unexpectedly in 2013. Nikolai Uraltsev was an excellent theorist and a wonderful friend, and this book is to honor his ground breaking work in fundamental physics, such as CP violation, instantons and renormalons in QCD, and in particular his work on the heavy quark expansion.The book summarizes some aspects of QCD from a special perspective, which is relevant for the applications of QCD in the context of weak interactions. This includes CP violation in hadronic processes as well as the hadronic matrix elements in weak decays. The reader will get insight into the special way of understanding fundamental physics, which was peculiar of our former colleague Nikolai Uraltsev.

This comprehensive work thoroughly introduces and reviews the set of results from Belle and BaBar - after more than two decades of independent and complementary work - all the way from the detectors and the analysis tools used, up to the physics results, and the interpretation of these results. The world's two giant B Factory collaborations, Belle at KEK and BaBar at SLAC, have successfully completed their main mission to discover and quantify CP violation in the decays of B mesons. CP violation is a necessary requirement to distinguish unambiguously between matter and antimatter. The shared primary objective of the two B Factory experiments was to determine the shape of the so-called unitarity triangle, an abstract triangle representing interactions of quarks, the elementary constituents of matter. The area of the triangle is a measure of the amount of CP violation associated with the weak force. Many other measurements have been performed by the B Factories and are also discussed in this work.

The book constitutes a compact review of the applications of effective field theory methods in flavour physics, with emphasis on heavy quark physics. Some of the relevant applications are discussed to illustrate the method.

It covers the full range of theoretical tools related to the application of the effective field theory idea: Starting from the weak interactions as an effective theory derived from the standard model, well-established methods such as heavy quark effective theory, the heavy quark mass expansion and chiral perturbation theory are addressed. Also more recent ideas such as QCD factorization and soft collinear effective theory are outlined.

Finally the standard model itself is viewed as an effective theory, allowing a model-independent look at the results of the new physics. The book should be useful for the advanced graduate student as well as for scientists who are interested in the theoretical toolkit used in the context of flavour physics. It is not meant as a complete review of the subject, rather it should be useful as an introduction to the basic ideas.