(medium-modified) Fragmentation Functions

In this short review paper, we discuss some of the recent advances in the field of parton fragmentation processes into hadrons as well as their possible modifications in QCD media. Hadron production data in ee, deep inelastic scattering and hadronic collisions are presented, together with global analyses of fragmentation functions into light and heavy hadrons and developments on parton fragmentation in perturbative QCD at small momentum fraction. Motivated by the recent RHIC data indicating a significant suppression of large-p⊥ hadron production in heavy-ion collisions, several recent attempts to model mediummodified fragmentation, e.g. by solving “medium” evolution equations or through Monte Carlo studies, have been proposed and are discussed in detail. Finally we mention the possibility to extract medium-modified fragmentation functions using photon–hadron correlations.