https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2016-16316-6
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Proton fragmentation functions considering finite-mass corrections
1
Faculty of Physics, Yazd University, P.O.Box 89195-741, Yazd, Iran
2
School of Particles and Accelerators, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), P.O.Box 19395-5531, Tehran, Iran
3
Department of Physics, Payame Noor Universtiy, P.O.Box 19395-3697, Tehran, Iran
* e-mail: mmoosavi@yazd.ac.ir
Received:
2
May
2016
Accepted:
15
September
2016
Published online:
19
October
2016
We present new sets of proton fragmentation functions (FFs) describing the production of protons from the gluon and each of the quarks, obtained by the NLO QCD fits to all relevant data sets of single-inclusive electron-positron annihilation. Specifically, we determine their uncertainties using the Gaussian method for error estimation. Our analysis is in good agreement with the e
+
e
- annihilation data. We also include finite-mass effects of the proton in our calculations, a topic to which very little attention is paid in the literature. Proton mass effects turn out to be appreciable for gluon and light quark FFs. The inclusion of finite-mass effects tends to improve the overall description of the data by reducing the minimized 
values significantly. As an application, we apply the extracted FFs to make 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 FFs.
© SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2016
