Heavy quark fragmentation functions at next-to-leading perturbative QCD

TL;DR

This paper reviews the perturbative fragmentation functions formalism at next-to-leading order (NLO) for heavy quark hadronization, calculates the NLO FF for a heavy quark into a heavy meson, and compares results with experimental data.

Contribution

It extends the perturbative FF formalism to NLO and provides explicit calculations for heavy quark to heavy meson fragmentation functions.

Findings

NLO FFs for charm quark to D-meson are computed.

Analytic results are compared with experimental data.

The formalism improves understanding of heavy quark hadronization.

Abstract

It is well-known that the dominant mechanism to produce hadronic bound states with large transverse momentum is fragmentation. This mechanism is described by the fragmentation functions (FFs) which are the universal and process-independent functions. Here, we review the perturbative FFs formalism as an appropriate tool for studying these hadronization processes and detail the extension of this formalism at next-to-leading order (NLO). Using the Suzuki's model, we calculate the perturbative QCD FF for a heavy quark to fragment into a S-wave heavy meson at NLO. As an example, we study the LO and NLO FFs for a charm quark to split into the S-wave $D$-meson and compare our analytic results both with experimental data and well-known phenomenological models.