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 e⁺{e}^{{{-}}}$ 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^-5, which implies that only 2% of the total pseudoscalar ground state Bc comes from the cascades of these orbitally excited states. {} 1996 The American Physical Society.