Gluon fragmentation to $D$ wave triplet quarkonia

We present a calculation of the leading order QCD fragmentation functions for gluons to split into spin-triplet D-wave quarkonia. We apply them to evaluate the gluon fragmentation contributions to inclusive ^3D_J quarkonium production at large transverse momentum processes like the Tevatron and find that the D-wave quarkonia, especially the charmonium 2^{--} state, could be observed through color-octet mechanism with present luminosity. Since there are distinctively large gaps between the contributions of two different (i.e, color-singlet and color-octet) quarkonium production mechanisms, our results may stand as a unique test to NRQCD color-octet quarkonium production mechanism.