Heavy-flavor Fragmentation: The QCD Portal to Exotic Hadron Matter

Abstract

We investigate the mechanisms underlying exotic hadron formation via the TQ4Q1.1 set of collinear fragmentation functions for fully charmed or bottomed tetraquarks in three quantum configurations: scalar (\(0^{++}\)), axial vector (\(1^{+-}\)), and tensor (\(2^{++}\)). We adopt leading-power single-parton fragmentation within a nonrelativistic QCD framework tailored to tetraquark Fock states. Initial-scale inputs are constructed from updated gluon and heavy-quark channels, and evolved through threshold-consistent DGLAP within HF-NRevo. We present a systematic implementation of uncertainty propagation from color-composite long-distance matrix elements governing tetraquark hadronization. This study further develops the connection between hadronic structure, precision QCD, and exotic hadron matter. Published by the Jagiellonian University 2026 authors