Fragmentation functions for pions, kaons, and protons at next-to-leading order

We present new sets of fragmentation functions for charged pions, charged kaons, and protons, both at the leading and next-to-leading orders. They are fitted to the scaled-momentum distributions of these hadrons measured in e(+)e(-) annihilation on the Z-boson resonance at CERN LEP1 and SLAG SLC. These data partly come as light-, charm-, bottom-quark-enriched and gluon-jet samples, which allows us to treat all partons independently, after imposing the SU(2) favour symmetry relations. In order to gain sensitivity to the scaling violation in fragmentation, we also include data from SLAG PEP, with center-of-mass energy root s = 29 GeV, in our fits. This allows us to also determine the strong-coupling constant, with a competitive error. LEP1 data on the longitudinal cross section as well as DESY DORIS and PETRA data at lower energies nicely agree with theoretical predictions based on our fragmentation functions. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.