Measurements of jet quenching with semi-inclusive hadron+jet distributions in Au+Au collisions at sNN =200 GeV

STAR Collaboration

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Abstract

The STAR Collaboration reports the measurement of semi-inclusive distributions of charged-particle jets recoiling from a high transverse momentum hadron trigger, in central and peripheral Au+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV. Charged jets are reconstructed with the anti-kT algorithm for jet radii R between 0.2 and 0.5 and with low infrared cutoff of track constituents (pT>0.2 GeV/c). A novel mixed-event technique is used to correct the large uncorrelated background present in heavy ion collisions. Corrected recoil jet distributions are reported at midrapidity, for charged-jet transverse momentum pT,jetch<30 GeV/c. Comparison is made to similar measurements for Pb+Pb collisions at s=2.76 TeV, to calculations for p+p collisions at s=200 GeV based on the pythia Monte Carlo generator and on a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD approach, and to theoretical calculations incorporating jet quenching. The recoil jet yield is suppressed in central relative to peripheral collisions, with the magnitude of the suppression corresponding to medium-induced charged energy transport out of the jet cone of 2.8±0.2(stat)±1.5(sys) GeV/c, for 10<pT,jetch<20 GeV/c and R=0.5. No medium-induced change in jet shape is observed for R<0.5. The azimuthal distribution of low-pT,jetch recoil jets may be enhanced at large azimuthal angles to the trigger axis, due to scattering off quasiparticles in the hot QCD medium. Measurement of this distribution gives a 90% statistical confidence upper limit to the yield enhancement at large deflection angles in central Au+Au collisions of 50±30(sys)% of the large-angle yield in p+p collisions predicted by pythia.

Original languageEnglish
Article number024905
JournalPhysical Review C
Volume96
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 14 2017

Funding

We thank the RHIC Operations Group and RCF at BNL, the NERSC Center at LBNL, and the Open Science Grid consortium for providing resources and support. This work was supported in part by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the US DOE Office of Science, the US National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chinese Academy of Science, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the Chinese Ministry of Education, the National Research Foundation of Korea, GA and MSMT of the Czech Republic, Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India; the National Science Centre of Poland, National Research Foundation, the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia, RosAtom of Russia and German Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) and the Helmholtz Association.

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