Study of jet fragmentation in p+p collisions at 200 GeV in the STAR experiment

TL;DR

This paper measures jet fragmentation functions in proton-proton collisions at 200 GeV to establish a baseline for understanding jet quenching effects in heavy-ion collisions, using various jet-finding algorithms and particle identifications.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of jet energy spectra and fragmentation functions for charged and strange particles in p+p collisions at RHIC energies, including different jet algorithms.

Findings

Fragmentation functions for charged and strange particles are characterized.

Jet energy spectra are systematically analyzed across algorithms.

Results serve as a baseline for heavy-ion collision studies.

Abstract

The measurement of jet fragmentation functions in p+p collisions at 200 GeV is of great interest because it provides a baseline to study jet quenching in heavy-ion collisions. It is expected that jet quenching in nuclear matter modifies the jet energy and multiplicity distributions, as well as the jet hadrochemical composition. Therefore, a systematic study of the fragmentation functions for charged hadrons and identified particles is a goal both in p+p and Au+Au collisions at RHIC. Studying fragmentation functions for identified particles is interesting in p+p by itself because it provides a test of NLO calculations at RHIC energies. We present a systematic comparison of jet energy spectra and fragment distributions using different jet-finding algorithms in p+p collisions in STAR. Fragmentation functions of charged and neutral strange particles are also reported for different jet energies.