This conference provided a comprehensive overview of the areas where fixed target experiments made significant contributions so that experimenters could see what work was left to be done. Since experiments at colliders contribute strongly in many of these areas, the participation of collider experimenters was welcomed and this edition of the conference contains many contributions from the collider community. In order to try to cover the huge amount of physics included in studies of heavy quarks, many of the contributions are review types, including both theoretical and experimental overviews in seven different areas: CP violation and mixing; heavy ions; production dynamics and structure functions; hadronic decays; semileptonic and leptonic decays; spectroscopy; and rare and forbidden decays. This volume is divided into these seven areas of interest.

This up-to-date review also serves as an introduction to Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET) - a new approach to heavy quark physics problems in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The book also contains a detailed discussion of the methods of calculation used in HQET, along with numerous illustrations.

The lectures collected in this book present a comprehensive review of the current knowledge of heavy-quark physics, from the points of view of both theory and experiment. Heavy Flavour Physics has accomplished enormous progress during the last few years: the last heavy quark has been discovered and the quality of the collected data on the other relatively lighter quarks has dramatically improved. On the theory side, noticeable progress has been reported on new calculations of decay rates based on various techniques, such as QCD sum rules, heavy-quark mass expansion and lattice QCD. The theory of heavy quark production is constantly improving and awaiting new results. Nevertheless there are strong reasons to believe that the Standard Model of High Energy Physics is incomplete. It exhibits very peculiar patterns for which it offers no explanation. The basic constituents of matter are arranged into three seemingly identical generations or families of quarks and leptons, differing merely in their masses. The pattern in the fermion masses, why they are families and why there are three of them is not yet understood. Furthermore it is known that at least within the standard model there is an intimate connection between the replication of families and the gateway of CP violation, in addition, the latter phenomenon is a crucial ingredient in explaining why our universe is made up almost exclusively of matter rather than being more or less matter-antimatter symmetric. How and to what extent can Heavy Flavour Physics impact on these questions? Does it offer novel windows onto New Physics beyond the Standard Model in general and onto new symmetries, such as Supersymmetry in particular? These questions constitute the central theme of this book. The material treated in this publication may serve as reference for the segment of the high-energy community actively engaged in heavy-quark physics.

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.

50 years after the discovery of the pion in Bristol, the conference “Physics in Collision XVII” showed how far particle physics has come. There were hints of new physics at HERA and neutrino oscillations as well as the latest results from LEP and the Tevatron. The proceedings present the current status and future direction of particle physics.