Heavy quark fragmentation functions forD-wave quarkonium and charmedb-flavored mesons

At the large transverse momentum region, the production of heavy-heavy bound states such as charmonium, bottomonium, and b¯c mesons in high energy ${\mathit{e}}^{+}$ ${\mathit{e}}^{\mathrm{-}}$ and hadronic collisions is dominated by parton fragmentation. We calculate the heavy quark fragmentation functions into the D-wave quarkonium and b¯c mesons to leading order in the strong coupling constant and in the nonrelativistic expansion. In the b¯c meson case, one set of its D-wave states is expected to lie below the open flavor threshold. The total fragmentation probability for a b¯ antiquark to split into the D-wave b¯c mesons is about 2×${10}^{\mathrm{-}5}$, which implies that only 2% of the total pseudoscalar ground state ${\mathit{B}}_{\mathit{c}}$ comes from the cascades of these orbitally excited states. © 1996 The American Physical Society.