Simultaneous extraction of fragmentation functions of light charged hadrons with mass corrections

TL;DR

This paper presents a new set of fragmentation functions for light charged hadrons derived from high-order QCD analysis of electron-positron annihilation data, including mass corrections, improving precision for collider predictions.

Contribution

The paper introduces the { t SGKS20} fragmentation functions obtained through a simultaneous global analysis at NNLO, incorporating mass effects and a wide range of experimental data.

Findings

{ t SGKS20} FFs show good agreement with data at small z.

Including mass corrections impacts the FFs significantly.

The new FFs are available via LHAPDF for broader use.

Abstract

Achieving the highest possible precision for theoretical predictions at the present and future high-energy lepton and hadron colliders requires a precise determination of fragmentation functions (FFs) of light and heavy charged hadrons from a global QCD analysis with great accuracy. We describe a simultaneous determination of unpolarized FFs of charged pions, charged kaons and protons/antiprotons from single-inclusive hadron production in electron-positron annihilation (SIA) data at next-to-leading order and next-to-next-to-leading order accuracy in perturbative QCD. A new set of FFs, called {\tt SGKS20}, is presented. We include data for identified light charged hadrons ($\pi^\pm, K^\pm$ and $p/\bar{p}$) as well as for unidentified light charged hadrons, $h^\pm$ and show that these data have a significant impact on both size and uncertainties of the fragmentation functions. We examine the inclusion of higher-order perturbative QCD corrections and finite-mass effects. We compare the new {\tt SGKS20} FFs with other recent FFs available in the literature and find in general reasonable agreement, but also important differences for some parton species. We show that theoretical predictions obtained from our new FFs are in very good agreement with the analyzed SIA data, especially at small values of $z$. The {\tt SGKS20} FF sets presented in this work are available via the {\tt LHAPDF} interface.