Eta Fragmentation Functions Revisited

We revisit the extraction of parton-to-eta meson fragmentation functions at next-to-leading order accuracy in QCD in the light of the recent hadroproduction measurements in proton-proton collisions obtained by the PHENIX, LHCb, and ALICE collaborations. In addition to an increased precision, the data explore complementary rapidity ranges and center-of-mass system energies. The analysis exploits the theoretical scale dependence to ease tensions among the data sets at different energies that are potentially caused by QCD corrections beyond the next-to-leading order. The resulting set of fragmentation functions yields a consistent description of all available data. Estimates of uncertainties are obtained with the Monte Carlo replica method.. Authors: Aidala, Christine A.; Loomis, Devon A.; Martinez, Ramiro Tomas; Sassot, Rodolfo; Stratmann, Marco. DOE Contract: SC0013393. Subjects: FOS: Physical sciences; High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)