$B_c$ mesons in a Bethe-Salpeter model

Abstract

We apply our Bethe-Salpeter model for mesons to the $B_c$ family with parameters fixed in our previous investigation. We evaluate the mass of the pseudo-scalar $B_c$ meson as 6.356 GeV/$c^2$ and 6.380 GeV/$c^2$ and the lifetime as 0.47 ps and 0.46 ps respectively in two reductions of the Bethe-Salpeter Equation, in good agreement with the recently reported mass of 6.40 $\pm$ 0.39 (stat.) $\pm$ 0.13 (syst.) GeV/$c^2$ and lifetime of $0.46^{+0.18}_{-0.16}$ (stat.) $\pm$ 0.03 (syst.) ps by the CDF Collaboration. We evaluate the decay constant of the $B_c$ meson and compare different contributions to its decay width.