Heavy-Flavor Fragmentation from HF-NRevo: Status, Prospects, and Intrinsic Charm

TL;DR

The paper introduces the HF-NRevo framework for heavy-flavor fragmentation, combining NRQCD calculations with scale evolution, and extends it to exotic states, aiding studies at colliders and in heavy-ion environments.

Contribution

It develops the HF-NRevo scheme for heavy-flavor fragmentation, including new fragmentation functions and extensions to exotic tetraquark states, enhancing QCD phenomenology and collider analyses.

Findings

Constructed the NRFF1.0 fragmentation functions for heavy quarkonia.

Extended the scheme to describe heavy tetraquarks with TQ4Q2.0 sets.

Proposed applications in heavy-ion collisions and intrinsic charm studies.

Abstract

We report on recent developments of the Heavy-Flavor Non-Relativistic evolution (HF-NRevo) scheme, a framework designed to describe heavy-hadron formation through leading-power fragmentation at moderate and large transverse momentum. The approach combines short-distance inputs obtained from next-to-leading-order NRQCD calculations with collinear scale evolution in a variable-flavor-number scheme, ensuring a consistent treatment of heavy-flavor thresholds and partonic hierarchies. Within this setup we have constructed the NRFF1.0 family of fragmentation functions for $S$-wave heavy quarkonia in their leading NRQCD Fock states. We discuss prospective applications of the HF-NRevo framework in the heavy-ion environment, where it can provide a perturbative baseline for investigating medium-induced modifications of heavy-flavor fragmentation. Its explicit treatment of partonic channels and heavy-flavor thresholds makes it particularly suitable for exploring jet-quenching sensitivity, energy-loss mechanisms, and the emergence of medium-modified fragmentation patterns in the quark-gluon plasma. The HF-NRevo scheme has also been extended to the exotic sector through the TQ4Q1.x and newly released TQ4Q2.0 fragmentation sets, which describe the formation of fully heavy tetraquarks in multiple quantum configurations. These developments open a novel pathway to study quarkoniumlike states and to probe the intrinsic charm content of the proton in forward hadron-collision environments. Altogether, this program broadens the phenomenological reach of heavy-flavor fragmentation studies at the HL-LHC and future collider facilities, opening access to previously unexplored aspects of QCD and potential portals to New Physics.