A study of charm hadron production in e^+e^- annihilation

TL;DR

This paper investigates charm hadron production in electron-positron annihilation at different energies, analyzing fragmentation functions and their differences for mesons and baryons using experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract and approximate nonperturbative fragmentation functions from experimental data, explaining differences via quark counting.

Findings

Fragmentation functions show scaling violation at NLL accuracy.

Nonperturbative fragmentation functions can be approximated analytically.

Differences between meson and baryon fragmentation functions are explained by quark counting.

Abstract

The processes of D^{(*)}-mesons and \Lambda_c-baryons production in e^+e^--annihilation at 10.58 GeV and 91.18 GeV energies are concerned. At the 10.58 GeV energy the production of charmed particles via the B-mesons decays is also concerned. Scaling violation of the fragmentation functions is calculated at the NLL-accuracy. Nonperturbative fragmentation functions are retrieved from the experimental data of B-factories and are approximated by simple analytic expressions. It is proved, that the difference between nonperturbative fragmentation functions of mesons and baryons can be easily explained by quark counting.