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 quantum chromodynamics (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. Next-to-leading order 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.