Off-shell Fragmentation

A new framework is sketched for the treatment of the hadronisation of a highly-virtual quark and anti-quark jet pair created in electron-positron annihilations. As in such a case, factorization theorem does not work, a new scale-evolution equation is proposed for the fragmentation functions. In this approach, the virtuality of the leading parton (taken to be equal to the mass of the jet it induces) is used as fragmentation scale.