A determination of the fragmentation functions of u-quarks into charged pions

Abstract The fragmentation functions of u-quarks into positive and negative pions are determined from an analysis of identified pions produced in deep inelastic muon-deuterium scattering. The method adopted is not sensitive to the knowledge of the primary quark distribution functions. The fragmentation of u quarks to positive pions is found to fall less steeply in z than that to negative pions as expected in the quark parton model.