Determination of fragmentation functions and their application to exotic-hadron search

Abstract

We discuss studies on determination of fragmentation functions and an application to exotic-hadron search by using characteristic differences between favored and disfavored functions. The optimum fragmentation functions are determined for pion, kaon, and proton in the leading order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO) of the running coupling constant alpha_s by global analyses of hadron-production data in electron-positron annihilation. Various parametrization results are much different in disfavored-quark and gluon fragmentation functions; however, we show that they are within uncertainties of the determined functions by using the Hessian method for uncertainty estimation. We find that the uncertainties are especially large in the disfavored-quark and gluon fragmentation functions. NLO improvements are explicitly shown in the determination by comparing uncertainties of the LO and NLO functions. Next, we propose to use differences between favored and disfavored fragmentation functions for determining internal quark configurations of exotic hadrons. We make a global analysis for f_0 (980) for finding its internal configuration; however, uncertainties are too large to specify the structure at this stage.