Using Heavy Quark Fragmentation into Heavy Hadrons to Determine QCD Parameters and Test Heavy Quark Symmetry

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the use of heavy quark fragmentation into heavy hadrons for testing the heavy quark effective theory through comparison of the measured fragmentation parameters of the $c$ and $b$ quarks. Our analysis is entirely model independent. We interpret the known perturbative evolution in a way useful for exploiting heavy quark symmetry at low energy. We first show consistency with perturbative QCD scaling for measurements done solely with $c$ quarks. We then apply the perturbative analysis and the heavy quark expansion to relate measurements from ARGUS and LEP. We place bounds on a nonperturbative quark mass suppressed parameter, and compare the values for the $b$ and $c$ quarks. We find consistency with the heavy quark expansion but fairly sizable QCD uncertainties. We also suggest that one might reduce the systematic uncertainty in the result by not extrapolating to low $z$.

26 pages in LaTeX, with 9 PostScript figures included (using epsf macros). MIT-CTP-2257

References in corpus (1)

• Heavy Quark Fragmentation into Heavy Mesons

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Measurement of the b-quark fragmentation function in Z0 decays
• A Study of Heavy Flavoured Meson Fragmentation Functions in e+ e- annihilation
• A Phenomenological Study of Heavy-Quark Fragmentation Functions in e+e- Annihilation
• Precise measurement of the b-quark fragmentation function in Z0 boson decays
• Perturbative Prediction for Parton Fragmentation into Heavy Hadron
• Inclusive Lambda_c Production in e^+e^- Annihilations at sqrt{s}=10.54 GeV and in Upsilon(4S) Decays
• NNLO B-fragmentation fits and their application to $t\bar{t}$ production and decay at the LHC
• Measurement of the B Hadron Energy Distribution in Z0 Decays
• Quark-hadron-duality in the charmonium and upsilon system
• Power-suppressed effects in heavy quark fragmentation functions