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

At hadron colliders the dominant production mechanism of (b̄c) mesons with large transverse momentum is due to parton fragmentation. We compute the rates and transverse momentum spectra for production of S-wave and P-wave (b̄c) mesons at the Tevatron via the direct fragmentation of the bottom antiquark as well as the AltarelliParisi induced gluon fragmentation. Since all the radially and orbitally excited (b̄c) mesons below the BD flavor threshold will cascade into the pseudoscalar ground state Bc through electromagnetic and/or hadronic transitions, they all contribute to the inclusive production of Bc. The contributions of the excited S-wave and P-wave states to the inclusive production of Bc are 58 and 23%, respectively, and hence significant. Internet address: [email protected] Internet address: [email protected]