No Arabic abstract
We present a quantum-mechanical description of quark-hadron fragmentation in a nuclear environment. It employs the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, which takes care of all phases and interferences, and which contains all relevant time scales, like production, coherence, formation, etc. The cross section includes the probability of pre-hadron (colorless dipole) production both inside and outside the medium. Moreover, it also includes inside-outside production, which is a typical quantum-mechanical interference effect (like twin-slit electron propagation). We observe a substantial suppression caused by the medium, even if the pre-hadron is produced outside the medium and no energy loss is involved. This important source of suppression is missed in the usual energy-loss scenario interpreting the effect of jet quenching observed in heavy ion collisions. This may be one of the reasons of a too large gluon density, reported by such analyzes.
We discuss preliminary results on medium-modified fragmentation functions obtained in a combined NLO fit to data on semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering off nuclei and hadroproduction in deuteron-gold collisions.
Medium-induced gluon radiation is usually identified as the dominant dynamical mechanism underling the {it jet quenching} phenomenon observed in heavy-ion collisions. In its actual implementation, multiple medium-induced gluon emissions are assumed to be independent, leading, in the eikonal approximation, to a Poisson distribution. Here, we introduce a medium term in the splitting probabilities so that both medium and vacuum contributions are included on the same footing in a DGLAP approach. The improvements include energy-momentum conservation at each individual splitting, medium-modified virtuality evolution and a coherent implementation of vacuum and medium splitting probabilities. Noticeably, the usual formalism is recovered when the virtuality and the energy of the parton are very large. This leads to a similar description of the suppression observed in heavy-ion collisions with values of the transport coefficient of the same order as those obtained using the {it quenching weights}.
We present the mini-proceedings of the workshop on ``Parton fragmentation in the vacuum and in the medium held at the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (ECT*, Trento) in February 2008. The workshop gathered both theorists and experimentalists to discuss the current status of investigations of quark and gluon fragmentation into hadrons at different accelerator facilities (LEP, B-factories, JLab, HERA, RHIC, and Tevatron) as well as preparations for extension of these studies at the LHC. The main physics topics covered were: (i) light-quark and gluon fragmentation in the vacuum including theoretical (global fits analyses and MLLA) and experimental (data from e+e-, p-p, e-p collisions) aspects, (ii) strange and heavy-quark fragmentation, (iii) parton fragmentation in cold QCD matter (nuclear DIS), and (iv) medium-modified fragmentation in hot and dense QCD matter (high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions). These mini-proceedings consist of an introduction and short summaries of the talks presented at the meeting.
Coupled linear Boltzmann transport and hydrodynamic (CoLBT-hydro) model has been developed for simultaneous simulations of jet propagation and jet-induced medium excitation in heavy-ion collisions. Within this coupled approach, the final reconstructed jets in heavy-ion collisions include not only hadrons from the hadronization of medium modified jet shower partons from the linear Boltzmann transport (LBT) but also hadrons from the freeze-out of the jet-induced medium excitation in the hydrodynamic evolution of the bulk medium. Using the CoLBT-hydro model, we study medium modification of the fragmentation functions of $gamma$-triggered jets in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. The CoLBT-hydro model is shown to describe the experimental data not only on the suppression of leading hadrons within the jet cone at large momentum fraction $z_gamma=p_T^h/p_T^gamma$ relative to the transverse momentum of the trigger photon due to parton energy loss but also the enhancement of soft hadrons at small $z_gamma$ and $z_{rm jet}=p_T^h/p_T^{rm jet}$ due to jet-induced medium excitation. There is no suppression of the fragmentation function, however, at large momentum fraction $z_{rm jet}$ relative to the transverse momentum of the reconstructed jet due to trigger bias and medium modification of quark to gluon jet fraction. For jets whose final transverse momenta are comparable to or larger than that of the trigger photon, the trigger bias can lead to enhancement of the jet fragmentation function at large $z_{rm jet}$.
The second-order hydrodynamic equations for evolution of shear and bulk viscous pressure have been derived within the framework of covariant kinetic theory based on the effective fugacity quasiparticle model. The temperature-dependent fugacity parameter in the equilibrium distribution function leads to a mean field term in the Boltzmann equation which affects the interactions in the hot QCD matter. The viscous corrections to distribution function, up to second-order in gradient expansion, have been obtained by employing a Chapman-Enskog like iterative solution of the effective Boltzmann equation within the relaxation time approximation. The effect of mean field contributions to transport coefficients as well as entropy current has been studied up to second-order in gradients. In contrast to the previous calculations, we find non-vanishing entropy flux at second order. The effective description of relativistic second-order viscous hydrodynamics, for a system of interacting quarks and gluons, has been quantitatively analyzed in the case of the $1+1-$dimensional boost invariant longitudinal expansion. We study the proper time evolution of temperature, pressure anisotropy, and viscous corrections to entropy density for this simplified expansion. The second order evolution of quark-gluon plasma is seen to be affected significantly with the inclusion of mean field contributions and the realistic equation of state.