We present an improved light-cone sum rule analysis of the decay form factors of $D$ and $D_s$ into $eta$ and $eta^{prime}$ and argue that these decays offer a very promissing possibility to determine the leading Fock-state gluonic contribution of th
e $eta$ at future experimental facilities as FAIR or Super-KEKB. We also give the corresponding branching ratios for B decays.
We analyze lattice data for octet baryon masses from the QCDSF collaboration employing manifestly covariant Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory. It is shown that certain combinations of low-energy constants can be fixed more accurately than before from
this data. We also examine the impact of this analysis on the pion-nucleon sigma term, and on the convergence properties of baryon mass expansions in the SU(3) symmetry limit.
We present a detailed phenomenological study of the prospects of open charm physics at the future $bar{p}p$ and $pp$ facilities GSI-FAIR and J-PARC, respectively. In particular, we concentrate on differential cross sections and the charge and longitu
dinal double-spin asymmetries at next-to-leading order accuracy. Theoretical uncertainties for the proposed observables are estimated by varying the charm quark mass and the renormalization and factorization scales.
