Towards a Unified Understanding of Jet Quenching and Elliptic Flow within Perturbative QCD Parton Transport

TL;DR

This paper uses a perturbative QCD-based parton cascade to study jet quenching and elliptic flow in heavy-ion collisions, showing a consistent microscopic approach to both phenomena within the same framework.

Contribution

It introduces a unified perturbative QCD transport model that simultaneously describes jet quenching and elliptic flow in nuclear collisions.

Findings

Flat quenching pattern up to 30 GeV transverse momentum.

Quenching slightly smaller than Gyulassy-Levai-Vitev results.

Microscopic transport can investigate jet quenching and elliptic flow together.

Abstract

The gluonic contribution to the nuclear modification factor R_AA is investigated for central Au + Au collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV employing a perturbative QCD-based parton cascade including radiative processes. A flat quenching pattern is found up to transverse momenta of 30 GeV which is slightly smaller compared with results from the Gyulassy-Levai-Vitev formalism. We demonstrate that the present microscopic transport description provides challenging means of investigating both jet-quenching and a strong buildup of elliptic flow in terms of the same standard perturbative QCD interactions.