Production of Bc mesons in photon-photon and hadron-hadron collisions

Abstract

We discuss two-photon and hadronic production of Bc mesons in nonrelativistic bound state approximation and to lowest order in the coupling constants a and a s . It is shown that in photon-photon collisions, heavy quark fragmentation is dominated by recombination of b and c quarks up to the highest accessible transverse momenta. In contrast, in hadroproduction, which at high energies mainly involves gluon-gluon collisions, the fragmentation mechanism dominates at transverse momenta py > mRc, providing a simple and satisfactory approximation of the complete 0(a ) ) results in the high-px regime. Contradictions in previous publications on hadroproduction of Bc mesons are clarified. We also present predictions for cross sections and differential distributions at present and future accelerators.