Fragmentation Functions for Lepton Pairs

Abstract

We calculate the fragmentation function for a light quark to decay into a lepton pair to leading order in the QCD coupling constant. In the formal definition of the fragmentation function, a QED phase must be included in the eikonal factor to guarantee QED gauge invariance. We find that the longitudinal polarization fraction is a decreasing function of the factorization scale, in accord with the intuitive expectation that the virtual photon should behave more and more like a real photon as the transverse momomentum of the fragmenting quark increases.

Comments: 13 pages, 4 figures, normalization corrected, text abbreviated