Charmed-Meson Fragmentation Functions with Finite-Mass Corrections

TL;DR

This paper develops a detailed model for the production of heavy-flavored hadrons in electron-positron collisions, incorporating finite-mass effects and fitting to experimental data to improve understanding of fragmentation functions.

Contribution

It introduces a next-to-leading order analysis with finite-mass corrections for charm-hadron fragmentation functions, fitting to multiple experimental datasets.

Findings

Finite-mass effects significantly influence phase space at Belle and CLEO conditions.

Charm-quark mass effects on matrix elements are relatively minor.

The analysis improves the precision of fragmentation function determinations.

Abstract

We elaborate the inclusive production of single heavy-flavored hadrons in e^+e^- annihilation at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme. In this framework, we determine non-perturbative fragmentation functions for D^0, D^+, and D^{*+} mesons by fitting experimental data from the Belle, CLEO, ALEPH, and OPAL Collaborations, taking dominant electroweak corrections due to photonic initial-state radiation into account. We assess the significance of finite-mass effects through comparisons with a similar analysis in the zero-mass variable-flavor-number scheme. Under Belle and CLEO experimental conditions, charmed-hadron mass effects on the phase space turn out to be appreciable, while charm-quark mass effects on the partonic matrix elements are less important.