Using heavy quark fragmentation into heavy hadrons to determine QCD parameters and test heavy quark symmetry Original Research Article

We present a detailed analysis of the use of heavy quark fragmentation into heavy hadrons for testing the heavy quark effective theory through comparison of the measured fragmentation parameters of the c and b quarks. Our analysis is entirely model independent. We interpret the known perturbative evolution in a way useful for exploiting heavy quark symmetry at low energy. We first show consistency with perturbative QCD scaling for measurements done solely with c quarks. We then apply the perturbative analysis and the heavy quark expansion to relate measurements from ARGUS and LEP We place bounds on a nonperturbative quark mass suppressed parameter, and compare the values for the b and c quarks. We find consistency with the heavy quark expansion but fairly sizable QCD uncertainties. We also suggest that one might reduce the systematic uncertainty in the result by not extrapolating to low z.