Speaker
Description
We investigate the inclusive hadroproduction of pseudoscalar heavy quarkonia, $\eta_c$ and $\eta_b$ mesons, in high-energy proton collisions at the 13 TeV LHC, focusing on the moderate to large transverse momentum regime. Our theoretical framework is based on the single-parton collinear fragmentation mechanism within a variable-flavor number scheme and it builds on Non-Relativistic QCD (NRQCD), which describes the formation of the heavy quark bound state at the initial scale at NLO. To accurately describe this process, we make use of the symJETHAD symbolic engine to produce and publicly release a new set of collinear fragmentation functions, denoted NRFF1.0. We performed our analysis within the NLL/NLO$^{+}$ hybrid factorization framework which has been used to study high-precision theoretical predictions for high-energy observables sensitive to quarkonium final states at the 13 TeV LHC. These FFs consistently include all partonic channels and evolve via standard DGLAP equations, accounting for all partonic thresholds. This framework offers a direct path toward addressing the long-standing quarkonium production puzzle and can be extended to investigate quarkonium fragmentation within jet. Furthermore, we extend our fragmentation analysis to the physics of dense media investigation of heavy-flavor fragmentation function evolution in the hot Quark-Gluon Plasma.
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