During recent years, the study of exotic hadrons including tetraquarks and pentaquarks has attracted a lot of interest, and more studies are in progress experimentally and theoretically. It is well known that at sufficiently large transverse momentum the dominant production mechanism for standard heavy hadrons (mesons/baryons) is actually the fragmentation so that the same mechanism is also proposed for the production of heavy exotic hadrons. This work is the first attempt to study the direct fragmentation of a heavy quark into ground state heavy tetraquarks in leading order of perturbative QCD. In this regard, we will present an analytical expression for the fragmentation production of neutral hidden flavor tetraquarks $(Qq\overline{Q}\overline{q})$ which includes most of the kinematical and dynamical properties of the process.

• Received 26 October 2021
• Accepted 15 January 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.034001

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Published by the American Physical Society