Heavy-Flavor Fragmentation: The QCD Portal to Exotic Matter

Abstract

We investigate the core dynamics behind exotic matter formation via the TQ4Q1.1 set of collinear fragmentation functions for fully charmed or bottomed tetraquarks in three quantum configurations: scalar ($0^{++}$), axial vector ($1^{+-}$), and tensor ($2^{++}$). We adopt leading-power single-parton fragmentation within a nonrelativistic QCD framework tailored to tetraquark Fock states. Initial-scale inputs are constructed from updated gluon- and heavy-quark channels, and evolved through threshold-consistent DGLAP within HF-NRevo. We present the first systematic propagation of uncertainties from color-composite long-distance matrix elements governing tetraquark hadronization. This study advances the connection between hadronic structure, precision QCD, and exotic matter.

Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure. Proceedings of the "Excited QCD 2026" Workshop, Universidad de Granada, Carmen de la Victoria (Spain), January 8-14, 2026