Hadronic production of S-wave and P-wave charmed beauty mesons via heavy quark fragmentation

Abstract

At hadron colliders the dominant production mechanism of ({bar b}c) mesons with large transverse momentum is due to parton fragmentation. The authors compute in a model-independent way the production rates and transverse momentum spectra for S-wave and P-wave ({bar b}c) mesons at the Tevatron via the direct fragmentation of the bottom antiquark as well as the Altarelli-Parisi induced gluon fragmentation. Since all the radially and orbitally excited ({bar b}c) mesons below the BD flavor threshold will cascade into the pseudoscalar ground state B{sub c} through electromagnetic and/or hadronic transitions, they all contribute to the inclusive production of B{sub c}. The contributions of the excited S-wave and P-wave states to the inclusive production of B{sub c} are 58 and 23%, respectively, and hence significant.