Production of orbitally excited B mesons in Z decays

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** to B(*) pi , where B** denotes a mixture of l=1 B meson spin states. The masses and decay widths of the B/sub 2/*(j/sub q/=3/2) and B/sub 1/*(j/sub 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. (21 refs).