Charm hadrons from fragmentation and B decays in e+e- annihilation at s=10.6GeV

Abstract

We present an analysis of charm quark fragmentation at 10.6 GeV, based on a data sample of 103fb-1 collected by the Belle detector at the KEKB accelerator. We consider fragmentation into the main charmed hadron ground states, namely D0,D+,Ds+ and Λc+, as well as the excited states D*0 and D*+. The fragmentation functions are important to measure as they describe processes at a low energy scale, where calculations in perturbation theory lead to large uncertainties. Fragmentation functions can also be used as input distributions for Monte Carlo generators. Additionally, we determine the average number of these charmed hadrons produced per B decay at the Υ(4S) resonance and measure the distribution of their production angle in e+e- annihilation events and in B decays. © 2006 The American Physical Society.