The impact of data from future lepton colliders on light hadrons fragmentation functions

TL;DR

This study evaluates how future lepton colliders can significantly improve the precision of fragmentation functions for light hadrons, using NLO QCD analysis and simulated data from upcoming experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of future collider data on fragmentation functions, including an update to the FMNLO program for NNLO calculations.

Findings

Future colliders can greatly reduce FF uncertainties.

High energies enable quark flavor separation.

Inclusion of higher-order corrections enhances analysis accuracy.

Abstract

In this work, we study the constraining power of future lepton colliders on fragmentation functions (FFs) to light charged hadrons from quarks and gluon in the framework of QCD collinear factorization. We perform analyses of FFs at NLO by including a wide range of pseudo--data from future lepton colliders, such as measurements on hadron multiplicities in the production of two jets and $W$ boson pairs, at various center of mass energies, and from hadronic decays of the Higgs boson, including both to heavy quarks and to gluons. The high luminosity and high energies of future lepton colliders allow for quark flavor separations and ensure a precise determination of FFs based solely on data from electron-positron collisions. We find that either the CEPC, FCC-$ee$ or ILC can significantly reduce the uncertainties of FFs in a wide kinematic range, compared to the NPC23 set obtained with a global analysis to current world data. We also discuss the impact of higher-order QCD corrections, and the potential constraints from measurements of three-jet production. Furthermore, we describe an update of the FMNLO program allowing for calculating hadron production cross sections at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD, which is used in this study.