Prospects of Jet Tomography Using Hard Processes inside a Soft Medium

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of using high transverse momentum processes in heavy-ion collisions as probes to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma through a unified model framework.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive model analysis of various high p_T observables to evaluate their effectiveness for medium tomography in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Different observables show varying sensitivity to medium properties.

The model helps identify promising probes for tomography.

Results suggest potential for detailed medium characterization.

Abstract

The term 'tomography' is commonly applied to the idea of studying properties of a medium by the modifications this medium induces to a known probe propagating through it. In the context of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, rare high transverse momentum (p_T) processes taking place alongside soft bulk-matter production can be viewed as a tomographic probe as long as the energy scales are such that the modification of high p_T processes can be dominantly ascribed to interactions with the medium during the propagation of partons. Various high p_T observables have been suggested for tomography, among them hard single hadron suppression, dihadron correlations and gamma-hadron correlations. In this paper, we present a model study of a number of different observables within the same calculational framework to assess the sensitivity of the observables to different properties of the medium and discuss the prospects of obtaining tomographic information.