Global extraction of the parton-to-kaon fragmentation functions at NLO in QCD

R J Hernández-Pinto,R Sassot,M Epele,M Stratmann,D De Florian

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/912/1/012043

Abstract

In this document, we present the global QCD analysis of parton-to-kaon fragmentation functions at next-to-leading order accuracy using the latest experimental information on single-inclusive kaon production in electron-positron annihilation, lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering, and proton-proton collisions. An extended analysis of this work can be found in Ref. [1].

Highlights

Parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions (FFs) parametrize how quarks and gluons that are produced in hard interactions at high energies confine themselves into hadrons measured and identified in experiment
We present the global QCD analysis of parton-to-kaon fragmentation functions at next-to-leading order accuracy using the latest experimental information on single-inclusive kaon production in electron-positron annihilation, lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering, and proton-proton collisions
This information is beyond the reach of perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics and must be inferred from the wealth of data on identified hadron production under the theoretical assumption that the relevant non-perturbative dynamics of FFs factorizes in a universal way from the calculable hard partonic cross sections up to small corrections which can be usually neglected

Summary

Introduction

Parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions (FFs) parametrize how quarks and gluons that are produced in hard interactions at high energies confine themselves into hadrons measured and identified in experiment. In total we have 20 free fit parameters describing our updated FFs for quarks, antiquarks, and gluons into a positively charged kaon. These parameters are determined from data by a standard χ2-minimization procedure that includes a χ2-penalty from computing the optimum relative normalization of each experimental set of data analytically as was outlined in the DSS 14 [2]

Data selection

Results

Conclusions