Heavy-to-light decays at large recoil: Systematic treatment of short- and long-distance QCD effects

Heavy quark decays into energetic, collinear quarks and gluons are discussed within an effective theory that accomplishes the factorization of soft and hard strong interaction effects. We derive the relevant effective Lagrangian, and perform the matching of the heavy quark current, including power corrections of order 1/m, where m is the heavy quark mass. We apply our framework to heavy-to-light form factors.