Improved Constraints on Pion Fragmentation Functions from Simulated Electron-Ion Collider Data

• Majid Azizi (School of Particles and Accelerators - IPM)

I present a quantitative study of how future Electron–Ion Collider (EIC) semi-inclusive DIS (SIDIS) measurements can improve the determination of parton-to-pion fragmentation functions. Using an NLO pQCD framework with a neural-network parametrization and Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation, we perform two global fits: (i) existing SIA and SIDIS data (HERMES and COMPASS), and (ii) the same dataset augmented by EIC SIDIS pseudo-data at. The pseudo-data are generated consistently within the same NLO collinear-factorization framework, with realistic statistical and correlated systematic uncertainties. We find that including EIC pseudo-data leads to a substantial reduction of fragmentation-function uncertainties, most notably at medium-to-large z, with particularly strong gains for selected light-quark channels and a clear improvement for the gluon fragmentation function.