Relativistic bound-state effects in heavy-meson physics

By using a QCD relativistic potential model we compute several physical quantities for heavy-light-quark $Q\overline{q}$ mesons: current-particle matrix elements, leptonic decay constants in the limit $m_Q\to \infty$, and the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements $V_{\mathrm{bu}}$ and $V_{\mathrm{bc}}$ from recent CLEO and ARGUS data on semileptonic inclusive $B$ decays. A comparison with other theoretical approaches is also presented.