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.

At the large transverse momentum region, the production of heavy-heavy bound-states such as charmonium, bottomonium, and {anti b}c mesons in high energy ee− and hadronic collisions is dominated by parton fragmentation. The authors calculate the heavy quark fragmentation functions into the D-wave quarkonium and {anti b}c mesons to leading order in the strong coupling constant and in the non-relativistic expansion. In the {anti 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 {anti b} antiquark to split into the D-wave {anti b}c mesons is about 2 x 10−5, which implies that only 2% of the total pseudo-scalar ground state B{sub c} comes from the cascades of these orbitally excited states.