Production, Decay, and Polarization of Excited Heavy Hadrons

We discuss the production via fragmentation of excited heavy mesons and baryons, and their subsequent decay. In particular, we consider the question of whether a net polarization of the initial heavy quark may be detected, either in a polarization of the final ground state or in anisotropies in the decay products of the excited hadron. The result hinges in part on a nonperturbative parameter which measures the net transverse alignment of the light degrees of freedom in the fragmentation process. We use existing data on charmed mesons to extract this quantity for certain excited mesons. Using this result, we estimate the polarization retention of charm and bottom baryons.