Pion nuclear fragmentation functions revisited

Abstract

We revisit the notion of nuclear parton-to-pion fragmentation functions at next-to-leading order accuracyas an effective description of hadroproduction in nuclear environments such as in semi-inclusive lepton-nucleus deep-inelastic scattering and in single inclusive proton-nucleus collisions. We assess their viabilityin the face of very precise data collected for the latter at the CERN-LHC over the past decade as well asrecent measurements of the former carried out by the CLAS experiment at JLab.