When a BranchSpec is created by AbstractGitSCMSource it's name doesn't contain the "origin/" prefix. If the branch name doesn't contain a slash ("/"), the branch name is considered "unqualified" and for matching purposes a regular expressing with a "*/" prefix is used.
If the unqualified branch name contains a slash, it is treated as qualified name and no wildcard is prepended. This has the effect that a branch doesn't match itself (e.g. when polling a repository for changes, see line 591 of GitSCM).

Given that an unqualified branch name may contain slashes, it is not possible to recognize unqualified branch names from the absence of a slash (see line 124 of BranchSpec).

A proposed (partial) solution can be found at https://github.com/gv2011/git-plugin/tree/branch-name.

Here the qualified branch name is used when AbstractGitSCMSource creates a BranchSpec.

For the String constructor, the problem can possibly be avoided by always using the qualified branch name (prefix "origin/"). Anyway, this is a very confusing situation because SCMHead uses the unqualified name. Additionally, when you talk about a branch in a remote repository, you normally don't care about the local name of the remote repository.

I suppose that only in very special use cases a name different from "origin" will be needed.