Applications of QCD Sum Rules to Heavy Quark Physics

In these lectures, I present several important applications of QCDsum rules to the decay processes involving heavy-flavour hadrons.The first lecture is introductory. As a study case, the sum rulesfor decay constants of the heavy-light mesons are considered. Theyare relevant for the leptonic decays of $B$-mesons. In the secondlecture I describe the method of QCD light-cone sum rules used tocalculate the heavy-to-light form factors at large hadronic recoil,such as the $B\to \pi \ell \nu_\ell$ form factors. In the third lecture,the nonlocal hadronic amplitudes in the flavour-changing neutralcurrent decays $B\to K^{(*)}\ell\ell$ are discussed. Light-cone sumrules provide important nonfactorizable contributions to these effects.T = Applications of QCD Sum Rules to Heavy Quark Physic