Heavy quark mass effects in parton-to-kaon hadronization probabilities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy quark masses influence the probabilities of partons transforming into kaons during high-energy collisions, using a next-to-leading order QCD analysis with a mass-aware scheme.

Contribution

It introduces a mass-dependent flavor number scheme for extracting parton-to-kaon hadronization probabilities and compares it with massless approaches.

Findings

Mass effects mildly improve kaon production data description.

Charm hadronization probability shows noticeable change.

Mass-dependent scheme significantly improves pion fragmentation fits.

Abstract

We examine the relevance of the heavy quarks masses in the perturbative QCD description of hard interactions where charged kaons are produced in the final state. We extract a set of parton-to-kaon hadronization probabilities from a next to leading order QCD global analysis where a general mass variable flavor number scheme accounting for mass effects is implemented. We compare the results with those obtained in the massless approximation and also with those found in the case of final state pions. At variance with the very significant improvement found for the much more precise pion fragmentation phenomenology, the heavy quark mass dependent scheme improves mildly the overall description of current kaon production data. Nevertheless, the changes in the charm hadronization probability are noticeable.