Deflected Jets or Hot Spots? Conical Correlations of Hard Trigger Particles

TL;DR

This paper investigates the origin of double-peak structures in dihadron correlations in heavy-ion collisions, showing that averaging over many jets in an expanding medium can produce a single peak, unlike hot spot scenarios which always show two.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the double-peak structure's evolution with trigger particle hardness is due to averaging effects in an expanding medium, distinguishing it from hot spot scenarios.

Findings

Double-peak structure merges into a single peak for harder triggers in expanding backgrounds.

Hot spot scenarios consistently produce two distinct peaks regardless of trigger hardness.

Averaging over many jets can mimic the observed single-peak structure in experimental data.

Abstract

The double-peak structure observed in soft-hard dihadron correlations was recently studied intensively in order to learn more about the jet-induced medium excitation in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Experimental data shows that the double-peak structure obtained for soft trigger particles coalesces into one peak for harder trigger particles. We demonstrate that this effect occurs when averaging over many jet events in a transversally expanding background, while a hot spot scenario always leads to two distinct peaks. This suggests to study soft-hard correlations induced by heavy-flavor jets with those generated by light-flavor jets at RHIC and LHC in order to really disentangle medium effects from jets.