Parton energy loss in QCD matter

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.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; plenary talk at the 8th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-energy Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probes 2016), Wuhan, China, September 23-27, 201

Dissipative Axial Inflation

We analyze in detail the background cosmological evolution of a scalar field coupled to a massless abelian gauge field through an axial term $\frac{\phi}{f_\gamma} F \tilde{F}$, such as in the case of an axion. Gauge fields in this case are known to experience tachyonic growth and therefore can backreact on the background as an effective dissipation into radiation energy density $\rho_R$, which which can lead to inflation without the need of a flat potential. We analyze the system, for momenta $k$ smaller than the cutoff $f_\gamma$, including numerically the backreaction. We consider the evolution from a given static initial condition and explicitly show that, if $f_\gamma$ is smaller than the field excursion $\phi_0$ by about a factor of at least ${\cal O} (20)$, there is a friction effect which turns on before that the field can fall down and which can then lead to a very long stage of inflation with a generic potential. In addition we find superimposed oscillations, which would get imprinted on any kind of perturbations, scalars and tensors. Such oscillations have a period of 4-5 efolds and an amplitude which is typically less than a few percent and decreases linearly with $f_\gamma$. We also stress that the comoving curvature perturbation on uniform density should be sensitive to slow-roll parameters related to $\rho_R$ rather than $\dot{\phi}^2/2$, although we postpone a calculation of the power spectrum and of non-gaussianity to future work and we simply define and compute suitable slow roll parameters. Finally we stress that this scenario may be realized in the axion case, if the coupling $1/f_\gamma$ to U(1) (photons) is much larger than the coupling $1/f_G$ to non-abelian gauge fields (gluons), since the latter sets the range of the potential and therefore the maximal allowed $\phi_0\sim f_G$.Comment: 22 pages, 27 figure

Massless Mode and Positivity Violation in Hot QCD

We calculate the quark self-energy at one-loop level at high temperature, taking into account contributions from both the (chromo)electric scale $gT$ and the (chromo)magnetic scale $g^2T$. While reproducing standard massive excitations due to the electric scale, we uncover a novel massless excitation ascribable to the magnetic scale. The residue of this massless excitation is nonpositive at all temperatures, which consequently gives rise to positivity violation in the quark spectral functions. This demonstrates the profound impact of confinement effects on thermal quark collective excitations, which manifest genuine long-range correlations in the system.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; v3 - published versio

Sudakov suppression of jets in QCD media

We compute modifications to the jet spectrum in the presence of a dense medium. We show that in the large-$N_c$ approximation and at leading logarithmic accuracy the jet nuclear modification factor factorizes into a quenching factor associated to the total jet color charge and a Sudakov suppression factor which accounts for the energy loss of jet substructure fluctuations. This factor, called the jet collimator, implements the fact that subjets, that are not resolved by the medium, lose energy coherently as a single color charge, whereas resolved large angle fluctuations suffer more quenching. For comparison, we show that neglecting color coherence results in a stronger suppression of the jet nuclear modification factor.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Radiative energy loss of neighboring subjets

We compute the in-medium energy loss probability distribution of two neighboring subjets at leading order, in the large-$N_c$ approximation. Our result exhibits a gradual onset of color decoherence of the system and accounts for two expected limiting cases. When the angular separation is smaller than the characteristic angle for medium-induced radiation, the two-pronged substructure lose energy coherently as a single color charge, namely that of the parent parton. At large angular separation the two subjets lose energy independently. Our result is a first step towards quantifying effects of energy loss as a result of the fluctuation of the multi-parton jet substructure and therefore goes beyond the standard approach to jet quenching based on single parton energy loss. We briefly discuss applications to jet observables in heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 34 pages, 15 figure

Groomed jets in heavy-ion collisions: sensitivity to medium-induced bremsstrahlung

We argue that contemporary jet substructure techniques might facilitate a more direct measurement of hard medium-induced gluon bremsstrahlung in heavy-ion collisions, and focus specifically on the "soft drop declustering" procedure that singles out the two leading jet substructures. Assuming coherent jet energy loss, we find an enhancement of the distribution of the energy fractions shared by the two substructures at small subjet energy caused by hard medium-induced gluon radiation. Departures from this approximation are discussed, in particular, the effects of colour decoherence and the contamination of the grooming procedure by soft background. Finally, we propose a complementary observable, that is the ratio of the two-pronged probability in Pb-Pb to proton-proton collisions and discuss its sensitivity to various energy loss mechanisms.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Parton energy loss: new theoretical progress

The physics of jet quenching combines the dynamics of the QCD parton shower with bremsstrahlung radiation and decoherence processes induced by interactions with an underlying medium. Here we present a brief overview of the established features of medium-induced bremsstrahlung spectrum in a deconfined QCD plasma, highlight the aspect of rapid jet showering inside the medium and compute the resulting energy lost out of the jet cone in heavy-ion collisions.publishedVersio

Jet (de)coherence in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC

We study the modifications of jets created in heavy-ion collisions at LHC energies. The inherent hierarchy of scales governing the jet evolution allows to distinguish a leading jet structure, which interacts coherently with the medium as a single color charge, from softer sub-structures that will be sensitive to effects of color decoherence. We argue how this separation comes about and show that this picture is consistent with experimental data on reconstructed jets at the LHC, providing a quantitative description simultaneously of the jet nuclear modification factor, the missing energy in di-jet events and the modification of the fragmentation functions. In particular, we demonstrate that effects due to color decoherence are manifest in the excess of soft particles measured in fragmentation functions in Pb-Pb compared to proton-proton collisions.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Towards tomography of quark-gluon plasma using double inclusive forward-central jets in Pb-Pb collision

We propose a new framework, merging High Energy Factorization with final-state jet quenching effects due to interactions in a quark-gluon plasma, to compute di-jet rates at mid- and forward rapidity. It allows to consistently study the interplay of initial-state effects with medium interactions, opening the possibility for understanding the dynamics of hard probes in heavy-ion collisions and the QGP evolution in rapidity.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure