Fragmentation Functions For Protons Research Articles

Determination of contributions from residual light charged hadrons to inclusive charged hadrons from e+e- annihilation data

In this paper, we present an extraction of the contribution from the "{\it residual}" light charged hadrons to the inclusive unidentified light charged hadron fragmentation functions (FFs) at next-to-leading (NLO) and, for the first time, at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy in perturbative QCD. Considering the contributions from charged pion, kaon and (anti)proton FFs from recent {\tt NNFF1.0} analysis of charged hadron FFs, we determine the small but efficient {\it residual} charged hadron FFs from QCD analysis of all available single inclusive unidentified charged hadron data sets in electron-positron ($e^+ e^-$) annihilations. The zero-mass variable flavor number scheme (ZM-VFNS) has been applied to account the heavy flavor contributions. The obtained optimum set of {\it residual} charged hadron FFs is accompanied by the well-known Hessian technique to assess the uncertainties in the extraction of these new sets of FFs. It is shown that the {\it residual} contributions of charged hadron FFs have very important impact on the inclusive charged hadron FFs and substantially on the quality and the reliability of the QCD fit. Furthermore, this study shows that the {\it residual} contributions become also sizable for the case of heavy quark FFs as well as for the $c$- and $b$-tagged cross sections.

Proton fragmentation functions considering finite-mass corrections

We present new sets of proton fragmentation functions describing the production of protons from the gluon and each of the quarks, obtained by a global fit to all relevant data sets extracted from the single-inclusive electron-positron annihilation. Our analysis is in good agreement with $e^+e^-$ annihilation data. We also impose the finite-mass effects of proton in our calculations, a topic with a very little attention paid to in the literatures. Proton mass effects turn out to be appreciable for the gluon and light quark fragmentation functions, so the inclusion of finite-mass effects tends to improve the overall description of the data by reducing the minimized $\chi^2$ values, significantly. As an application, we also apply the extracted fragmentation functions to make our predictions for the scaled-energy distribution of protons inclusively produced in top quark decays at next-to-leading order, relying on the universality and scaling violations of fragmentation functions.

Fragmentation functions of the pion, kaon, and proton in the NLO approximation: Laplace transform approach

Using repeated Laplace transform, We find an analytical solution for DGLAP evolution equations for extracting the pion, kaon and proton Fragmentation Functions (FFs) at NLO approximation. We also study the symmetry breaking of the sea quarks Fragmentation Functions, $D_{\bar q}^h (z,Q^2)$ and simply separated them according to their mass ratio. Finally, we calculate the total Fragmentation Functions of these hadrons and compare them with experimental data and those from global fits. Our results show a good agreement with the FFs obtained from global parameterizations as well as with the experimental data.

Global analysis of fragmentation functions for protons and charged hadrons

We present new sets of fragmentation functions for protons and inclusive charged hadrons obtained in combined next-to-leading order QCD analyses of single-inclusive hadron production in electron-positron annihilation, proton-proton collisions, and deep-inelastic lepton-proton scattering. These analyses complement previous results for pion and kaon fragmentation functions with charge and flavor discrimination. The Lagrange multiplier technique is used to assess the uncertainties in the extraction of the new sets of fragmentation functions.