Stabilizing BFKL via heavy-flavor and NRQCD fragmentation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the stability of high-energy resummation in QCD is linked to the fragmentation of heavy hadrons, providing predictions at NLL/NLO accuracy to support this connection.

Contribution

It reveals the connection between high-energy resummation stability and heavy-hadron fragmentation mechanisms, with new predictions using NLL/NLO calculations in a hybrid factorization framework.

Findings

Stability is connected to gluon channels in heavy-flavor fragmentation functions.

Predictions show the stabilizing mechanism is encoded in gluon fragmentation.

Results support the role of NRQCD in heavy-hadron fragmentation stability.

Abstract

We bring evidence that the recently discovered property of natural stability of the high-energy resummation is directly connected to the fragmentation mechanism of heavy hadrons. As a phenomenological support, we provide predictions for differential distributions sensitive to heavy-hadron tags, calculated at the next-to-leading logarithmic level of the hybrid high-energy/collinear factorization (NLL/NLO), as implemented in the JETHAD multimodular code. We show that the stabilizing mechanism is encoded in gluon channels of both heavy-flavor collinear fragmentation functions extracted from data and the ones evolved from a non-relativistic QCD input.