Heavy quark fragmentation functions at next-to-leading perturbative QCD

Abstract: It is well-known that the dominant mechanism to produce hadronic bound states with large transverse momentum is fragmentation. This mechanism is described by the fragmentation functions (FFs) which are the universal and process-independent functions. Here, we review the perturbative FFs formalism as an appropriate tool for studying these hadronization processes and detail the extension of this formalism at next-to-leading order (NLO). Using the Suzuki's model, we calculate the perturbative QCD FF for a heavy quark to fragment into a S-wave heavy meson at NLO. As an example, we study the LO and NLO FFs for a charm quark to split into the S-wave $D$-meson and compare our analytic results both with experimental data and well-known phenomenological models.