Impact of unidentified light charged hadron data on the determination of pion fragmentation functions

In this paper a new comprehensive analysis of parton-to-pion fragmentation functions (FFs) is performed for the first time by including all experimental datasets on single inclusive pion as well as unidentified light charged hadron production in electron-positron (eþe−) annihilation.We determine the pion FFs along with their uncertainties using the standard “Hessian” technique at next-to-leading order (NLO) and next-to-nextto- leading order (NNLO) in perturbative QCD. It is shown that the determination of pion FFs using simultaneously the datasets from pion and unidentified light charged hadron production leads to the reduction of all pion FF uncertainties, especially for the case of strange quark and gluon FFs by significant factors. In this study, we have quantified the constraints that these datasets could impose on the extracted pion FFs. Our results also illustrate the significant improvement in the precision of FFs fits achievable by the inclusion of higher-order corrections. The improvements on FF uncertainties as well as fit quality have been clearly discussed