Heavy quark peturbative QCD fragmentation functions in the presence of hadron mass

TL;DR

This paper derives an analytical expression for heavy quark fragmentation functions in perturbative QCD, incorporating hadron mass effects, and compares the results with phenomenological models and experimental data.

Contribution

It provides a new exact analytical formulation of heavy quark fragmentation functions including hadron mass effects, advancing theoretical understanding and modeling accuracy.

Findings

Analytical FF expression including meson mass effects

Comparison with phenomenological models shows good agreement

Mass effects influence low-z behavior of fragmentation functions

Abstract

The dominant mechanism to produce hadronic bound states with large transverse momentum is fragmentation, that is the splitting of a high energy parton into a hadronic state and other partons. We review the present schemes to calculate the heavy quark fragmentation functions (FFs) and drive an exact analytical expression of FF which includes most of the kinematical and dynamical properties of the process. Using the perturbative QCD, we calculate the FF for c-quark to split into S-wave D-meson to leading order in the QCD coupling constant. Our result is compared with the current well-known phenomenological models which are obtained through a global fit to e+e- data from SLAC SLC and CERN LEP1 and we also compare the FF with experimental data form BELLE and CLEO. Specically, we study the effect of outgoing meson mass on the pQCD FF. Meson masses are responsible for the low-z threshold, where z is the scaled energy variable.