Foreword
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With the rich harvest of the two B-factories Belle and BaBar, the Cornell charm factory and the Tevatron, the field of heavy quarks is currently receiving much attention and has turned into a field of precision physics. The combination of both experimental work and theoretical efforts, have revealed almost perfect consistency with the Standard Model. In fact, the lack of significant deviations and absence of new phenomena have led to much theoretical speculations on the energy scale for the necessary extensions of the Standard Model. In the field of leptons, the attention has strongly shifted to the sector of neutrinos. The recent observations of neutrino oscillations have opened the field for new ideas, and many new experimental efforts are either ongoing or planned. We may expect many new surprises on both the nature of the neutrino and the completion of the mixing matrix in the lepton sector. The 2006 edition of the Conference on Heavy Quarks and Leptons (HQL2006) has been organized by the groups E18 and T31 from the Physics Department of the Technische Universitat Munchen and with the help of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik. It was the 8th edition in the biannual series, founded in 1993 by Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati with the aim to bring together experts in the fields of heavy quarks and leptons and to present the state-of-the-art of this area of research. In particular, junior physicists have been encouraged to give presentations, next to talks given by senior researchers. The present conference took place in the impressive environment of the hall of fame (’Ehrensaal’) of the German Museum of Science and Technology (’Deutsches Museum’) in which statues and busts of many famous scientists from the past are on continuous display. Under the supervision of Heisenberg, Hahn, Einstein and Planck, 47 talks were presented, grouped into 9 session, which are also reflected in the organization of this collection of proceedings articles. We would like to thank the international advisory committee for the help in building the scientific program and the effort to guarantee the high scientific level observed throughout HQL2006. We thank the speakers for their excellent presentations and their contributions to these proceedings. In fact the prices ’Heavy Quarks and Leptons Young Scientists Award’ for the best presentations by a young scientist were awarded to Cecilia Tarantino (1st place), Stephanie Hansmann-Menzemer (2nd place) and to Andreas Weiler and Lucio Cerrito (jointly holding the 3rd place). We would like to thank the local organizing committee for their dedication to make HQL2006 a successful conference. We are indebted to the staff of the groups T31 and E18 of the Physics Department as well as to the Max-Planck-Institut fur Physik (Werner-Heisenberg-Institut). The next edition of this conference series will take place in Melbourne (Australia) in 2008. We are looking forward to many more fruitful results, possibly with first insights from the LHC. Stephan Paul
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