Leading Particle Production in Light Flavour Jets

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy distribution and particle types with the highest momentum in light-flavour quark jets from Z0 decays, providing insights into hadronisation mechanisms and quark suppression factors.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed analysis of leading particle production for each light quark flavour using large LEP data, and compares results with QCD models to study hadronisation.

Findings

Determined the suppression factor gamma_s=0.422 for strange quarks.

Compared data to JETSET and HERWIG models, assessing their accuracy.

Analyzed baryon production features in light-flavour jets.

Abstract

The energy distribution and type of the particle with the highest momentum in quark jets are determined for each of the five quark flavours making only minimal model assumptions. The analysis is based on a large statistics sample of hadronic Z0 decays collected with the OPAL detector at the LEP e+e- collider. These results provide a basis for future studies of light flavour production at other centre-of-mass energies. We use our results to study the hadronisation mechanism in light flavour jets and compare the data to the QCD models JETSET and HERWIG. Within the JETSET model we also directly determine the suppression of strange quarks to be gamma_s=0.422+-0.049 (stat.)+-0.059 (syst.) by comparing the production of charged and neutral kaons in strange and non-strange light quark events. Finally we study the features of baryon production.