Importance of Fragmentation Functions in Determining Polarized Parton Densities

Abstract

New fragmentation functions (FFs) are extracted from a NLO QCD fit to the preliminary COMPASS data on pion and kaon multiplicities. It is shown that the new kaon FFs are very different from those of De Florian at al. (DSS) and Hirai et al. (HKNS). The sensitivity of the extracted polarized PDFs to the new FFs is discussed.