Extraction of Correlated Jet Pair Signals in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper discusses methods for extracting correlated jet pair signals in relativistic heavy ion collisions, focusing on background normalization techniques that do not assume jet shape, crucial for understanding jet modifications in such environments.

Contribution

It introduces a background normalization method that accurately estimates background yield without relying on jet shape assumptions in heavy ion collisions.

Findings

The absolute background normalization technique effectively separates jet signals from background.

Jet shapes are significantly distorted in heavy ion collisions compared to proton-proton collisions.

The method improves the accuracy of jet correlation analyses in complex collision environments.

Abstract

Multi-particle correlation techniques are frequently used to study jet shapes and yields in hadronic and nuclear collisions. To date, a standard assumption applied in such analyses is that the observed correlations arise from either jets and associated hard scattering phenomena, or from a background component due to combinatorial pairs connected only through whole even correlations. Within this assumption of two essentially independent sources, a fundamental problem centers around determining the relative contributions of each component. We discuss the methods commonly used to establish the background yield in jet correlation analyses, with a full explanation of the absolute background normalization technique which establishes the background yield without assumptions about the shape of jet correlations. This is especially important in relativistic heavy ion collisions where the jet shapes are significantly distorted from the well separated back-to-back di-jets observed in proton-proton collisions.