Jet lag effect and leading hadron production

We propose a solution for the long standing puzzle of a too steeply falling fragmentation function for a quark fragmenting into a pion, calculated by Berger [E.L. Berger, Phys. Lett. B 89 (1980) 241] in the Born approximation. Contrary to the simple anticipation that gluon resummation worsens the problem, we find good agreement with data. Higher quark Fock states slow down the quark, an effect which we call jet lag. It can be also expressed in terms of vacuum energy loss. As a result, the space–time development of the jet shrinks and the z-dependence becomes flatter than in the Born approximation. The space–time pattern is also of great importance for in-medium hadronization.