Nonperturbative treatment of heavy quarks and mesons

A formalism for studying heavy quarks in terms of model Dyson-Schwinger equations is developed. The formalism is the natural extension of a technique which has proved successful in a number of studies of light hadron physics. The dressed heavy quark propagator, calculated to leading order in the inverse quark mass, is incorporated in a treatment of mesons consisting of a heavy quark and light antiquark via the ladder approximation Bethe-Salpeter equation. In the limit of infinite heavy quark mass the model is found to respect the spectrum degeneracies present in heavy quark effective theory. An exploratory numerical analysis of a simple form of the model is carried out to assess its viability for studying $D$ and $B$ mesons.