B-c mesons in a Bethe-Salpeter model - art. no. 094001

We apply our Bethe-Salpeter model for mesons to the B-c family with paramet ers fixed in our previous investigation. We evaluate the mass of the pseudo scalar B-c meson as 6.356 and 6.380 GeV/c(2) and the lifetime as 0.47 and 0 .46 ps, respectively, in two reductions of the Bethe-Salpeter equation, in good agreement with the recently reported mass of 6.40+/-0.39 (stat) +/-0.1 3 (syst) GeV/c(2) and Lifetime of 0.46(-0.16)(+0.18) (stat) +/-0.03 (syst) ps by the CDF Collaboration. We evaluate the decay constant of the B-c meso n and compare different contributions to its decay width. [S0556-2821(99)02 203-1].