Charmed-meson fragmentation functions with finite-mass corrections Original Research Article

We elaborate the inclusive production of single heavy-flavored hadrons in image annihilation at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme. In this framework, we determine non-perturbative fragmentation functions for image, image, and image mesons by fitting experimental data from the Belle, CLEO, ALEPH, and OPAL Collaborations, taking dominant electroweak corrections due to photonic initial-state radiation into account. We assess the significance of finite-mass effects through comparisons with a similar analysis in the zero-mass variable-flavor-number scheme. Under Belle and CLEO experimental conditions, charmed-hadron mass effects on the phase space turn out to be appreciable, while charm-quark mass effects on the partonic matrix elements are less important.