Charged Hadron Fragmentation Functions at High Energy Colliders

Abstract

We update our extraction of parton-to-charged hadron fragmentation functions at next-to-leading order accuracy in QCD, focusing on the wealth of data collected at the Large Hadron Collider over the past decade. We obtain an accurate description of single-inclusive processes involving unidentified charged hadrons produced at different rapidities and transverse momenta in proton-proton collisions in a wide range of center-of-mass system energies between 0.9 and 13 TeV, along with measurements performed in proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron Collider in the past. NLO estimates of charged hadron production rates agree best with data when the theoretical factorization scales are selected similar to those optimized for identified pions, kaons, and protons in a recent global QCD analysis.