Global analysis for determining fragmentation functions and their uncertainties in light hadrons

Abstract

Fragmentation functions are determined for the pion, kaon, and proton by analyzing charged-hadron production data in electron-positron annihilation. It is important that uncertainties of the determined fragmentation functions are estimated in this analysis. Analysis results indicate that gluon and light-quark functions have large uncertainties especially at small Q^2. We find that next-to-leading-order (NLO) uncertainties are significantly reduced in comparison with leading-order (LO) ones in the pion and kaon. The fragmentation functions are very different in various analysis groups. However, all the recent functions are roughly within the estimated uncertainties, which indicates that they are consistent with each other. We provide a code for calculating the fragmentation functions and their uncertainties at a given kinematical point of z and Q^2 by a user.