Pion fragmentation functions at high energy colliders

Abstract

We revisit the description of pion production in proton-proton collisions in the light of the very precise data taken at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the past decade. First attempts to include LHC results in next-to-leading order global QCD analyses of parton-to-pion fragmentation functions insinuated some conflict between data sets at different center-of-mass system energies. We show that the data can be well described within their uncertainties by a consistent set of pion fragmentation functions once the theoretical scale dependence is taken into account in the global QCD analysis.