CHARGED-MESON PRODUCTION AND SCALING VIOLATIONS OF FRAGMENTATION FUNCTIONS IN DEEPLY INELASTIC-SCATTERING AT HERA

We compare recent experimental results for one-particle-inclusive proc esses in deeply inelastic scattering at HERA with theoretical predicti ons in next-to-leading-order QCD perturbation theory, and study the fa ctorization scale dependence of cross sections and charged multiplicit ies. In the future, for the HERA machine running at design luminosity, scaling violations of fragmentation functions permit the measurement of the strong coupling constant. We estimate the size of the statistic al error of alpha(s) that can be achieved, and study the theoretical e rror due to the various parton density parametrizations and due to the factorization scale dependence. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Scienc e B.V.