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  • Open Access

NNLO QCD calculation of hadron multiplicities in light-quark jets at lepton colliders

Bin Zhou* and Jun Gao†

  • State Key Laboratory of Dark Matter Physics, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, Key Laboratory for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (MOE), School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

  • *Contact author: zb0429@sjtu.edu.cn
  • †Contact author: jung49@sjtu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 074016 – Published 15 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/tjy3-tdxv

Abstract

We present the calculation of next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD corrections to hadron multiplicities in light-quark jets at lepton colliders, employing the “projection-to-Born” (P2B) method implemented in the FMNLO program. Taking the next-to-leading-order result as an example, we rigorously establish the validity of our P2B-based calculation. We then present NNLO predictions for the normalized asymmetry DK− between hadron and antihadron production in light-quark jets and compare them with SLD data. We find that a suppression of these SLD measurements relative to NPC23 predictions for DK− emerges in the intermediate zh domain (0.2≲zh≲0.7). We expect that incorporating these SLD data into global QCD fits will enable improved determination of fragmentation functions.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 074016– Published 15 October, 2025
  • Received 26 July 2025
  • Accepted 2 October 2025
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