Eur. Phys. J. A (2016) 52: 315
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2016-16315-7

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Heavy-quark fragmentation functions at next-to-leading perturbative QCD

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

^* e-mail: mmoosavi@yazd.ac.ir

Received: 1 July 2016
Accepted: 15 September 2016
Published online: 19 October 2016

Abstract

It is well known that the dominant mechanism to produce hadronic bound states with large transverse momentum is fragmentation. This mechanism is described by the fragmentation functions (FFs) which are the universal and process-independent functions. Here, we review the perturbative FFs formalism as an appropriate tool for studying these hadronization processes and detail the extension of this formalism at next-to-leading order (NLO). Using Suzuki's model, we calculate the perturbative QCD FF for a heavy quark to fragment into a S-wave heavy meson at NLO. As an example, we study the LO and NLO FFs for a charm quark to split into the S-wave D-meson and compare our analytic results both with experimental data and well-known phenomenological models.