In this paper, we present an extraction of the contribution from the “residual” light charged hadrons to the inclusive unidentified light charged hadron fragmentation functions (FFs) at next-to-leading (NLO) and, for the first time, at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy in perturbative QCD. Considering the contributions from charged pion, kaon and (anti)proton FFs from recent NNFF1.0 analysis of charged hadron FFs, we determine the small but efficient residual charged hadron FFs from QCD analysis of all available single inclusive unidentified charged hadron data sets in electron-positron (e+e − ) annihilations. The zero-mass variable flavor number scheme (ZM-VFNS) has been applied to account for the heavy flavor contributions. The obtained optimum set of residual charged hadron FFs is accompanied by the well-known Hessian technique to assess the uncertainties in the extraction of these new sets of FFs. It is shown that the residual contributions of charged hadron FFs have a very important impact on the inclusive charged hadron FFs and substantially on the quality and the reliability of the QCD fit. Furthermore, this study shows that the residual contributions become also sizable for the case of heavy quark FFs as well as for the c- and b-tagged cross sections.

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