The production cross section of the Bc and Bc⁎ mesons via the fragmentation of b¯ quark at the next-to-leading-order accuracy

In this paper, in order to present an application of the next-to-leading order fragmentation function of b¯ heavy quark, we calculate the differential cross section as a function of transverse momentum pT and the integrated cross section for the Bc and Bc⁎ mesons. The hadronization mechanism is considered at the factorization approach and based on the initial conditions of the Suzuki fragmentation model. Our numerical results are presented at the center of mass energies of s=1.8 TeV, 1.96 TeV in pp¯ collision and at the center of mass energy of 7 TeV in pp collision in Large Hadron Collider. These results show that the next-to-leading order corrections of the fragmentation function increase the integrated cross section and the differential cross section of the production of Bc and Bc⁎ mesons relative to those at leading order. Based on these results, we conclude that production cross sections of both mesons increase by enhancement of the center of mass energy of the collider. Finally, we compare our numerical results at the leading order and next-to-leading order with the presented theoretical predictions.