In recent years, there are experimental reports on exotic-hadron candidates, which have different quark configurations from ordinary qqˉ and qqq constituents. However, it is not easy to confirm their exotic nature from global observables such as masses, spins, parities, and decay widths. At high energies, internal quark and gluon configurations could become more apparent because hadrons should be described by fundamental degrees of freedom of quarks and gluons in quantum chromodynamics. One of such possibilities is to use the fragmentation functions (FFs). In this work, accurate FFs of an exotic hadron candidate f0
Nearby in the stack
(980) are determined for the first time by an global analysis of experimental data on
e++e−→f0(980)+X
with recent precise measurements of the Belle collaboration. From the global analysis, we found that their second moments have a relation
Mu=Md≪Ms∼Mg
for up-quark, down-quark, strange-quark, and gluon FFs. Furthermore, the function
Dsf0(z)
is distributed in the larger-
z
region in comparison with the functions
Duf0(z)
,
Ddf0(z)
, and
Dgf0(z)
. These facts support that the
f0(980)
has the
ssˉ
configuration at high energies. This is a new finding that
f0(980)
should be considered mainly as the
ssˉ
state, which is different from our usual understanding as a tetraquark (or
KKˉ
) hadron from low-energy studies. Our results could indicate the transition of the internal configuration picture that
f0(980)
looks like a
qqˉ
state at high energies although it is described by tetra-quark or
KKˉ
molecule state at low energies. It sheds light on a new direction in exotic hadron physics.