Testing the universality of fragmentation functions

Using fragmentation functions for charged pions, charged kaons, and (anti)protons recently extracted from experimental data of e"+e"- annihilation at the Z-boson resonance and at centre-of-mass energy #sq root#(s)=29 GeV, we perform a global study of inclusive charged-hadron production in pp, #gamma#p, and #gamma##gamma# collisions at next-to-leading order in the parton model of quantum chromodynamics. Comparisons of our results with pp data from CERN SppS and the Fermilab Tevatron, #gamma#p data from DESY HERA, and #gamma##gamma# data from CERN LEP2 allow us to test the universality of the fragmentation functions predicted by the factorization theorem. Furthermore, we perform comparisons with e"+e"--annihilation data from LEP2 so as to test the scaling violations predicted by the Altarelli-Parisi evolution equations. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RA 2999(00-158) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman