Author: Vuko Brigljevic (ETH Zurich)
Title: Measurement of the Spectroscopy of Orbitally Excited B~Mesons with the L3 detector
Abstract: We measure the mass, decay width and production rate of orbitally excited B mesons in 1.25 million hadronic Z decays registered by the L3 detector in 1994 and 1995. B meson candidates are inclusively reconstructed and combined with charged pions produced at the event primary vertex. An excess of events above the expected background is observed in the B$\pi$ mass spectrum near 5.7 GeV. These events are interpreted as resulting from the decay $B^{**} \rightarrow \B^{(*)}\pi$, where $B^{**}$ denotes a mixture of L=1 B meson spin states. The masses and decay widths of the $B^*_2$ ($j_q = 3/2$) and $B^*_1$ ($j_q = 1/2$) resonances and the relative production rate for the combination of all spin states are extracted from a fit to the mass spectrum.
Comments: 7 pages, RevTeX