ON THE EXTRACTION OF NON-PERTURBATIVE EFFECTS IN THE FRAGMENTATION FUNCTIONS OF HEAVY QUARKS IN e+e− ANNIHILATION

The interest in refining our knowledge of the fragmentation functions for heavy quarks (HQFF) in e+e− annihilation stems mainly from the possibility of using them to improve our understanding of heavy-flavour hadroproduction and photoproduction. In fact, this is a quite clean environment where the impact of non-perturbative effects can be studied. The aim of this talk is to present new results on the size of non-perturbative effects on heavy-flavour production in e+e− annihilation. The outline of the talk is as follows. We first give a brief introduction of the fragmentationfunction formalism and we introduce an improved differential cross section, which merges together the O ( αs )