Proton fragmentation functions considering finite-mass corrections

Abstract

We present new sets of proton fragmentation functions describing the production of protons from the gluon and each of the quarks, obtained by a global fit to all relevant data sets extracted from the single-inclusive electron-positron annihilation. Our analysis is in good agreement with $e^+e^-$ annihilation data. We also impose the finite-mass effects of proton in our calculations, a topic with a very little attention paid to in the literatures. Proton mass effects turn out to be appreciable for the gluon and light quark fragmentation functions, so the inclusion of finite-mass effects tends to improve the overall description of the data by reducing the minimized $\chi^2$ values, significantly. As an application, we also apply the extracted fragmentation functions to make our predictions for the scaled-energy distribution of protons inclusively produced in top quark decays at next-to-leading order, relying on the universality and scaling violations of fragmentation functions.