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About the Bethe Salpeter Formalism in the Heavy Mass Limit

We investigate the Bethe--Salpeter description of mesons in the limit where one of the constituing quarks is infinitely heavy. To recover the non--relativistic quark model out of the Bethe--Salpeter formalism it is usual to assume that the potential is instantaneous and the Fock space is reduced to $Q\bar{q}$ states. We show that in the Feynman gauge in perturbation theory and for a heavy quark being on--mass shell the instantaneity of the potential is valid in the rest--frame of the meson. Furthermore we argue that to first order in the velocity exchange during a heavy meson transition, the error induced by the reduction of the Fock--space is small. This in turn justifies quark model calculations, even when one quark is light.