Jet energy loss in heavy ion collisions from RHIC to LHC energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates jet energy loss in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies, showing that similar suppression patterns suggest a consistent description of hot quark-gluon matter with weak nuclear shadowing effects.

Contribution

It applies the Gyulassy-Levai-Vitev model with various shadowing functions to describe experimental suppression data, highlighting the importance of nuclear shadowing in jet quenching.

Findings

Jet suppression patterns are similar at RHIC and LHC energies.

Weak nuclear shadowing can adequately describe the data.

Interplay between shadowing and energy loss is crucial for understanding results.

Abstract

The suppression of hadron production originated from the induced jet energy loss is one of the most accepted and well understood phenomena in heavy ion collisions, which indicates the formation of color deconfined matter consists of quarks, antiquarks and gluons. This phenomena has been seen at RHIC energies and now the first LHC results display a very similar effect. In fact, the suppression is so close to each other at 200 AGeV and 2.76 ATeV, that it is interesting to investigate if such a suppression pattern can exist at all. We use the Gyulassy-Levai-Vitev description of induced jet energy loss combined with different nuclear shadowing functions and describe the experimental data. We claim that a consistent picture can be obtained for the produced hot matter with a weak nuclear shadowing. The interplay between nuclear shadowing and jet energy loss playes a crucial role in the understanding of the experimental data.