No Arabic abstract
QCD jets, produced copiously in heavy-ion collisions at LHC and also at RHIC, serve as probes of the dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Jet fragmentation in the medium is interesting in its own right and, in order to extract pertinent information about the QGP, it has to be well understood. We present a brief overview of the physics involved and argue that jet substructure observables provide new opportunities for understanding the nature of the modifications.
We present an overview of a perturbative-kinetic approach to jet propagation, energy loss, and momentum broadening in a high temperature quark-gluon plasma. The leading-order kinetic equations describe the interactions between energetic jet-particles and a non-abelian plasma, consisting of on-shell thermal excitations and soft gluonic fields. These interactions include 2<->2 scatterings, collinear bremsstrahlung, and drag and momentum diffusion. We show how the contribution from the soft gluonic fields can be factorized into a set of Wilson line correlators on the light cone. We review recent field-theoretical developments, rooted in the causal properties of these correlators, which simplify the calculation of the appropriate Wilson lines in thermal field theory. With these simplifications lattice measurements of transverse momentum broadening have become possible, and the kinetic equations describing parton transport have been extended to next-to-leading order in the coupling g.
An energetic parton travelling through a quark-gluon plasma loses energy via occasional hard scatterings and frequent softer interactions. Whether or not these interactions admit a perturbative description, the effect of the soft interactions can be factorized and encoded in a small number of transport coefficients. In this work, we present a hard-soft factorized parton energy loss model which combines a stochastic description of soft interactions and rate-based modelling of hard scatterings. We introduce a scale to estimate the regime of validity of the stochastic description, allowing for a better understanding of the models applicability at small and large coupling. We study the energy and fermion-number cascade of energetic partons as an application of the model.
We investigate the medium induced fragmentation of jets in a high-temperature QCD plasma. Based on an effective kinetic theory of QCD, we study the non-equilibrium evolution of the jet shower and the chemical equilibration of jet fragments in the medium. By including radiative emissions as well as elastic interactions, our approach extends all the way from the jet energy scale to the temperature of the medium and includes important effects such as the recoil of the medium. We present results for the in-medium fragmentation, including chemical and kinetic equilibration of the soft fragments and discuss implications of our result to jet quenching physics and the problem of thermalization of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions.
Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are the standard tool for describing jet-like multi-particle final states. To apply them to the simulation of medium-modified jets in heavy ion collisions, a probabilistic implementation of medium-induced quantum interference effects is needed. Here, we analyze in detail how the quantum interference effects included in the BDMPS-Z formalism of medium-induced gluon radiation can be implemented in a quantitatively controlled, local probabilistic parton cascade. The resulting MC algorithm is formulated in terms of elastic and inelastic mean free paths, and it is by construction insensitive to the IR and UV divergences of the total elastic and inelastic cross sections that serve as its basic building blocks in the incoherent limit. Interference effects are implemented by reweighting gluon production histories as a function of the number of scattering centers that act within the gluon formation time. Unlike existing implementations based on gluon formation time, we find generic arguments for why a quantitative implementation of quantum interference cannot amount to a mere dead-time requirement for subsequent gluon production. We validate the proposed MC algorithm by comparing MC simulations with parametric dependencies and analytical results of the BDMPS-Z formalism. In particular, we show that the MC algorithm interpolates correctly between analytically known limiting cases for totally coherent and incoherent gluon production, and that it accounts quantitatively for the medium-induced gluon energy distribution and the resulting average parton energy loss. We also verify that the MC algorithm implements the transverse momentum broadening of the BDMPS-Z formalism. We finally discuss why the proposed MC algorithm provides a suitable starting point for going beyond the approximations of the BDMPS-Z formalism.
We revisit radiative parton energy loss in deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) off a large nucleus within the perturbative QCD approach. We calculate the gluon radiation spectra induced by double parton scattering in DIS without collinear expansion in the transverse momentum of initial gluons as in the original high-twist approach. The final radiative gluon spectrum can be expressed in terms of the convolution of hard partonic parts and unintegrated or transverse momentum dependent (TMD) quark-gluon correlations. The TMD quark-gluon correlation can be factorized approximately as a product of initial quark distribution and TMD gluon distribution which can be used to define the generalized or TMD jet transport coefficient. Under the static scattering center and soft radiative gluon approximation, we recover the result by Gylassy-Levai-Vitev (GLV) in the first order of the opacity expansion. The difference as a result of the soft radiative gluon approximation is investigated numerically under the static scattering center approximation.