# Impact of unidentified light charged hadron data on the determination of pion fragmentation functions

## TL;DR

This study performs a comprehensive analysis of pion fragmentation functions by including both pion and unidentified light charged hadron data in electron-positron annihilation, leading to more precise determinations at NLO and NNLO.

## Contribution

It introduces a combined analysis of pion and unidentified light hadron data for the first time, reducing uncertainties in pion FFs, especially for strange quarks and gluons, and demonstrates the impact of higher-order corrections.

## Key findings

- Uncertainty in pion FFs is significantly reduced when including unidentified hadron data.
- Higher-order (NNLO) corrections improve the precision of fragmentation function fits.
- Inclusion of diverse data sets enhances the constraints on pion fragmentation functions.

## Abstract

In this paper a new comprehensive analysis of parton-to-pion fragmentation functions (FFs) is performed for the first time by including all experimental data sets on single inclusive pion as well as unidentified light charged hadron production in electron-positron ($e^+e^-$) annihilation. We determine the pion FFs along with their uncertainties using the standard "Hessian" technique at next-to-leading order (NLO) and next-to-next-to leading order (NNLO) in perturabative QCD. It is shown that the determination of pion FFs using simultaneously the data sets from pion and unidentified light charged hadron productions leads to the reduction of all pion FFs uncertainties especially for the case of strange quark and gluon FFs by significant factors. In this study, we have quantified the constraints that these data sets could impose on the extracted pion FFs. Our results also illustrate the significant improvement in the precision of FFs fits achievable by inclusion of higher order corrections. The improvements on both FFs uncertainties as well as fit quality have been clearly discussed.