A fragmentation-based study of heavy quark production

Understand

Processes involving heavy quarks are a crucial component of the LHC physics program, both by themselves and as backgrounds for Higgs physics and new physics searches.

• In this work, we critically reconsider the validity of the widely-adopted approximation in which heavy quarks are generated at the matrix-element level, with special emphasis on the impact of the collinear logarithms associated with final-state heavy quark and gluon splittings.
• Our study, based on a perturbative fragmentation-function approach, explicitly shows that neglecting the resummation of collinear logarithms may yield inaccurate predictions, in particular when observables exclusive in the heavy quark degrees of freedom are considered.
• Our findings motivate the use of schemes which encompass the resummation of final-state collinear logarithms.