We compute the inclusive jet spectrum in the presence of a dense QCD medium by going beyond the single parton energy loss approximation. We show that higher-order corrections are important yielding large logarithmic contributions that must be resummed to all orders. This reflects the fact that jet quenching is sensitive to fluctuations of the jet substructure.
We calculate higher-order corrections to the quenching factor of heavy-quark jets due to hard, in-medium splittings in the framework of the BDMPS-Z formalism. These corrections turn out to be sensitive to a single mass-scale $m_ast = (hat q L)^{1/2}$, where $hat q$ is the medium transport coefficient and $L$ the path length, and allow to draw a distinction between the way light, with $m < m_ast$ (in contrast to massless $m=0$), and genuinely heavy, with $m > m_ast$, quark jets are quenched in the medium. We show that the corrections to the quenching factor at high energies are double-logarithmic and qualitatively of the same order as for the massless quark jet.
We present results for higher-order corrections to exclusive $mathrm{J}/psi$ production. This includes the first relativistic correction of order $v^2$ in quark velocity, and next-to-leading order corrections in $alpha_s$ for longitudinally polarized production. The relativistic corrections are found to be important for a good description of the HERA data, especially at small values of the photon virtuality. The next-to-leading order results for longitudinal production are evaluated numerically. We also demonstrate how the vector meson production provides complementary information to the structure functions for extracting the initial condition for the small-$x$ evolution of the dipole-proton scattering amplitude.
We provide a quantum field theory based description of the nonperturbative effects from hadronization for soft drop groomed jet mass distributions using the soft-collinear effective theory and the coherent branching formalism. There are two distinct regions of jet mass $m_J$ where grooming modifies hadronization effects. In a region with intermediate $m_J$ an operator expansion can be used, and the leading power corrections are given by three universal nonperturbative parameters that are independent of all kinematic variables and grooming parameters, and only depend on whether the parton initiating the jet is a quark or gluon. The leading power corrections in this region cannot be described by a standard normalized shape function. These power corrections depend on the kinematics of the subjet that stops soft drop through short distance coefficients, which encode a perturbatively calculable dependence on the jet transverse momentum, jet rapidity, and on the soft drop grooming parameters $z_{rm cut}$ and $beta$. Determining this dependence requires a resummation of large logarithms, which we carry out at LL order. For smaller $m_J$ there is a nonperturbative region described by a one-dimensional shape function that is unusual because it is not normalized to unity, and has a non-trivial dependence on $beta$.
In the last 30 years, the physics of jet quenching has gone from an early stage of a pure theoretical idea to initial theoretical calculations, experimental verification and now a powerful diagnostic tool for studying properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. I will describe my collaboration with Miklos Gyulassy in this exciting area of high-energy nuclear physics in the past 30 years on this special occasion of his 70th birthday and discuss what is ahead of us in jet tomographic study of QGP in heavy-ion collisions.
We present a simple formalism for the evolution of timelike jets in which tree-level matrix element corrections can be systematically incorporated, up to arbitrary parton multiplicities and over all of phase space, in a way that exponentiates the matching corrections. The scheme is cast as a shower Markov chain which generates one single unweighted event sample, that can be passed to standard hadronization models. Remaining perturbative uncertainties are estimated by providing several alternative weight sets for the same events, at a relatively modest additional overhead. As an explicit example, we consider Z -> q qbar evolution with unpolarized, massless quarks and include several formally subleading improvements as well as matching to tree-level matrix elements through alpha_s^4. The resulting algorithm is implemented in the publicly available VINCIA plugin to the PYTHIA 8 event generator.