Role of heavy quarks in light hadron fragmentation

We investigate the role of heavy quarks in the production of light flavored hadrons and in the determination of the corresponding nonperturbative hadronization probabilities. We define a general mass variable flavor number scheme for fragmentation functions that accounts for heavy quark mass effects, and perform a global QCD analysis to an up-to-date data set including very precise Belle and BABAR results. We show that the mass dependent picture provides a much more accurate and consistent description of the data.

Figure 1

Charm and bottom contribution to the SIA cross section computed with different approximations for the partonic cross sections and the same set of FFs.

Figure 2

Comparison between data from Belle and BABAR and estimates from the ZMVFN and GMVFN schemes.

Figure 3

FFs at $Q=4\mathrm{GeV}$ and $Q=M_Z$ coming from the ZMVFN and GMVFN schemes.