Weak Hamiltonian, CP Violation and Rare Decays

These lectures describe in detail the effective Hamiltonians for weak decays of mesons constructed by means of the operator product expansion and the renormalization group method. We calculate Wilson coeffcients of local operators, discuss mixing of operators under renormalization, the anomalous dimensions of operators and anomalous dimension matrices. We elaborate on the renormalzation scheme and renormalization scale dependences and their cancellations in physical amplitudes. In particular we discuss the issue of gamma-5 in D-dimensions and the role of evanescent operators in the calculation of two-loop anomalous dimensions. We present an explicit calculation of the 6 times 6 one-loop anomalous dimension matrix involving current-current and QCD-penguin operators and we give some hints how to properly calculate two-loop anomalous dimensions of these operators. In the phenonomenological part of these lectures we discuss in detail: CKM matrix, the unitarity triangle and its determination, two-body non-leptonic B-decays and the generalized factorization, the ratio epsilonprime/epsilon, B to Xₛ gamma, K^+ to pi^+ nu barnu, KL to pi⁰ nu barnu, B to Xₛ nu barnu, Bₛ to mu bar mu and some aspects of CP violation in B-decays.