On the next-to-next-to-leading order evolution of flavour-singlet fragmentation functions Original Research Article

We present the third-order contributions to the quark–gluon and gluon–quark timelike splitting functions for the evolution of fragmentation functions in perturbative QCD. These quantities have been derived by studying physical evolution kernels for photon- and Higgs-exchange structure functions in deep-inelastic scattering and their counterparts in semi-inclusive annihilation, together with constraints from the momentum sum rule and the supersymmetric limit. For this purpose we have also calculated the second-order coefficient functions for one-hadron inclusive Higgs decay in the heavy-top limit. A numerically tolerable uncertainty remains for the quark–gluon splitting function, which does not affect the endpoint logarithms for small and large momentum fractions. We briefly discuss these limits and illustrate the numerical impact of the third-order corrections. Compact and accurate parametrizations are provided for all third-order timelike splitting functions.