Weak B Decays into Orbitally Excited Charmed Mesons

The BaBar Collaboration has recently reported branching fractions for semileptonic decays of the $B$ meson into final states with charged and neutral $D_1(2420)$ and $D_2^{\ast }(2460)$, two narrow orbitally excited charmed mesons. We evaluate these branching fractions within the framework of a constituent quark model in two steps, one which involves a semileptonic decay and the other one mediated by a strong process. Our results are in agreement with the experimental data.