Fragmentation functions in nuclear media

Abstract

We perform a detailed phenomenological analysis of how well hadronization in nuclear environments can be described in terms of effective fragmentation functions. The medium modified fragmentation functions are assumed to factorize from the partonic scattering cross sections and evolve in the hard scale in the same way as the standard or vacuum fragmentation functions. Based on precise data on semiinclusive deep-inelastic scattering off nuclei and hadron production in deuteron-gold collisions, we extract sets of effective fragmentation functions for pions and kaons at next-to-leading order accuracy. The obtained sets provide a rather accurate description of the kinematical dependence of the analyzed cross sections and are found to differ significantly from standard fragmentation functions both in shape and magnitude. Our results support the notion of factorization and universality in the studied nuclear environments, at least in an effective way and within the precision of the available data.