A pQCD-based description of heavy and light flavor jet quenching

TL;DR

This paper models the modification of both light and heavy flavor jets in a quark-gluon plasma using a perturbative QCD approach, fitting transport coefficients to experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a pQCD-based framework incorporating three transport coefficients to describe jet quenching for all flavors, with constraints from HTL theory analyzed.

Findings

Transport coefficients favor larger values for heavy quarks.

Fit quality decreases when imposing HTL constraints.

Successful description of jet suppression and azimuthal anisotropy.

Abstract

We present a successful description of the medium modification of light and heavy flavor jets within a perturbative QCD (pQCD) based approach. Only the couplings involving hard partons are assumed to be weak. The effect of the medium on a hard parton, per unit time, is encoded in terms of three non-perturbative, related transport coefficients which describe the transverse momentum squared gained, the elastic energy loss and diffusion in elastic energy transfer. A fit of the centrality dependence of the suppression and the azimuthal anisotropy of leading hadrons tends to favor somewhat larger transport coefficients for heavy quarks. Imposing additional constraints based on leading order (LO) Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) effective theory, leads to a worsening of the fit.