Role of heavy quarks in light hadron fragmentation

Abstract

We investigate the role of heavy quarks in the production of light flavored hadrons and in the determination of the corresponding nonperturbative hadronization probabilities. We define a general mass variable flavor number scheme for fragmentation functions that accounts for heavy quark mass effects, and perform a global QCD analysis to an up-to-date data set including very precise Belle and BABAR results. We show that the mass dependent picture provides a much more accurate and consistent description of the data.