Theoretical aspects of hadron photoproduction

Abstract

We review recent developments in the theoretical description of inclusive single-hadron production at next-to-leading order in the parton model of quantum chromodynamics. Fragmentation functions are extracted from fits to data of inclusive pion and kaon production in e^+e^- annihilation at different centre-of-mass energies. Exploiting sensitivity to the scaling violation, one can simultaneously fit the asymptotic scale parameter Lambda so as to obtain an independent determination of the strong coupling constant alpha_s. Owing to the factorization theorem, the fragmentation functions only depend on the species of the produced particles, but not on the process by which they are produced. This allows one to make absolute theoretical predictions for inclusive pion and kaon production in other types of experiments such as photon-photon, photon-hadron, or hadron-hadron scattering. Recent data of photoproduction taken by the H1 and ZEUS Collaborations at DESY HERA nicely agree with such next-to-leading-order predictions.