Global analysis of fragmentation functions to charged hadrons with high-precision data from the LHC

Fragmentation functions (FFs) are essential nonperturbative QCD inputs for predicting hadron production cross sections in high energy scatterings. In this study, we present a joint determination of FFs for light charged hadrons through a global analysis at next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD. Our analysis incorporates a wide range of precision measurements from the LHC, as well as data from electron-positron collisions and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scatterings. By including measurements of jet fragmentation at the LHC in our global analysis, we are able to impose strong constraints on the gluon FFs. A careful selection of hadron kinematics is applied to ensure the validity of factorization and perturbative calculations of QCD. In addition, we introduce several methodological advances in fitting, resulting in a flexible parametrization form and the inclusion of theoretical uncertainties from perturbative calculations. Our best-fit predictions show very good agreement with the global data, with <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:msup><a:mi>χ</a:mi><a:mn>2</a:mn></a:msup><a:mo>/</a:mo><a:msub><a:mi>N</a:mi><a:mrow><a:mi>p</a:mi><a:mi>t</a:mi></a:mrow></a:msub><a:mo>∼</a:mo><a:mn>0.90</a:mn></a:math>. We also generate a large number of Hessian error sets to estimate uncertainties and correlations of the extracted FFs. FFs to charged pions (kaons and protons) are well constrained for momentum fractions down to 0.01 (0.1). Total momentum of partons carried by light charged hadrons are determined precisely. Their values for <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mi>u</c:mi></c:math>, <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><e:mi>d</e:mi></e:math> quarks and gluon saturate at about 50% for a lower cut of the momentum fraction of 0.01. Comparing our determinations to results from other groups, we find significant discrepancies, particularly for the proton fragmentation functions, as well as for gluon and unfavored quarks to pions and kaons. Pulls from individual datasets and impact of various choices of the analysis are also studied in details. Our analysis raises questions concerning existing and future experimental measurements, including the need for clarifications on the definitions of various hadron final states and the necessity of further measurements on fragmentation from heavy quarks. Additionally, we present an update of the program used for calculating hadron production cross sections. We demonstrate the broad applications of the program combined with our new FFs, including NLO predictions on jet charges in proton collisions and reference cross sections for heavy-ion collisions, which show good agreement with LHC data. Our FFs, including the error sets (denoted as NPC23), are publicly available in the form of LHAPDF6 grids. Published by the American Physical Society 2024