First determination of $D^{*+}$-meson fragmentation functions and their uncertainties at next-to-next-to-leading order

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first NNLO fragmentation functions for $D^{*+}$ mesons, derived from a global fit to experimental data, with implications for top quark decay analysis and LHC phenomenology.

Contribution

It provides the first NNLO $D^{*+}$-meson fragmentation functions obtained through a comprehensive global fit, including uncertainty estimation and practical applications.

Findings

The NNLO FFs accurately describe $D^{*+}$ production data.

The FFs enable precise predictions for top quark decay distributions.

Implications for LHC top-quark property searches are demonstrated.

Abstract

We present, for the first time, a set of next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) fragmentation functions (FFs) describing the production of charmed-meson $D^{*+}$ from partons. Exploiting the universality and scaling violations of FFs, we extract the NLO and NNLO FFs through a global fit to all relevant data sets from single-inclusive $e^+e^-$ annihilation. The uncertainties for the resulting FFs as well as the corresponding observables are estimated using the Hessian approach. We evaluate the quality of the {\tt SKM18} FFs determined in this analysis by comparing with the recent results in literature and show how they describe the available data for single-inclusive $D^{*+}$-meson production in electron-positron annihilation. As a practical application, we apply the extracted FFs to make our theoretical predictions for the scaled-energy distributions of $D^{*+}$-mesons inclusively produced in top quark decays. We explore the implications of {\tt SKM18} for LHC phenomenology and show that our findings of this study can be introduced as a channel to indirect search for top-quark properties.