Light quark fragmentation into S-wave fully charmed tetraquark

Abstract

We compute the fragmentation function of a light quark into S-wave fully-charmed tetraquarks ($T_{4c}$) within the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) framework, at leading order in ${\alpha }_s$ and $v$. We present results for light quark fragmentation into $T_{4c}$ and predict its contribution to $T_{4c}$ production at high transverse momentum ($p_T$) at the LHC and EIC. We also compare light quark fragmentation with charm quark and gluon fragmentation channels. Our analysis shows that the production cross section for $T_{4c}$ from light quark fragmentation is smaller than that from gluon fragmentation but larger than that from charm quark fragmentation.

Comments: 16 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables; updated to match the published version