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^** -> B^(*)pi, where
B^** denotes a mixture of L=1 B meson spin states. The masses and decay widths
of the B^*_2 (j_q = 3/2) and B^*_1 (j_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.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, presented at DPF99, UCLA (1999
