Using photon-hadron production to impose restrictions on heavy-hadrons fragmentation functions

TL;DR

This paper explores how photon-hadron production data can be used to better constrain heavy-hadron fragmentation functions, utilizing specific kinematic cuts and advanced QCD+QED corrections to improve the reliability of these non-perturbative models.

Contribution

It introduces a method to impose restrictions on heavy-hadron fragmentation functions using photon-hadron production data with specific cuts and NLO QCD + LO QED corrections.

Findings

Relations between u-started FFs derived

Reduction of theoretical uncertainties achieved

Enhanced constraints on heavy-hadron FFs obtained

Abstract

Fragmentation Functions (FF) are universal non-perturbative objects that model hadronization in some general kind of processes. They are mainly extracted from experimental data, hence constraining the parameters of the corresponding fits is crucial for achieving reliable results. As expected, the production of lighter hadrons is favoured w.r.t. heavy ones, thus we would like to exploit the precise knowledge of pion FFs to constraint the shape of kaon (or heavier) FFs. In this talk, we show how imposing specific cuts on photon-hadron production leads to relations between the $u$-started FFs. For doing so, we exploit the reconstruction of momentum fractions in terms of experimentally-accessible quantities and introduce NLO QCD + LO QED corrections to reduce the theoretical uncertainties.