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

摘要

At hadron colliders the dominant production mechanism of (\bar bc) mesons with large transverse momentum is due to parton fragmentation. We 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_c through electromagnetic and/or hadronic transitions, they all contribute to the inclusive production of B_c. The contributions of the excited S-wave and P-wave states to the inclusive production of B_c are 58 and 23\%, respectively, and hence significant.