Constraining the Physics of Jet Quenching

TL;DR

This paper reviews systematic studies of jet quenching in heavy ion collisions, highlighting how combining multiple data sets constrains models and supports a pQCD-based picture with medium-induced radiation as the dominant energy loss mechanism.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive meta-analysis of jet quenching models, identifying the key features consistent with experimental data and emphasizing the importance of combined systematics.

Findings

Only a small group of models fit the data well

Medium-induced radiation is the dominant energy loss mechanism

Elastic energy transfer plays a minor role

Abstract

Hard probes in the context of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions represent a key class of observables studied to gain informations about the QCD medium created in such collisions. However, in practice the so-called jet tomography has turned out to be more difficult than expected initially. One of the major obstacles in extracting reliable tomographic information from the data is that neither the parton-medium interaction nor the medium geometry are known with great precision, and thus a difference in model assumptions in the hard perturbative Quantum Choromdynamics (pQCD) modelling can usually be compensated by a corresponding change of assumptions in the soft bulk medium sector and vice versa. The only way to overcome this problem is to study the full systematics of combinations of parton-medium interaction and bulk medium evolution models. This work presents a meta-analysis summarizing results from a number of such systematical studies and discusses in detail how certain data sets provide specific constraints for models. Combining all available information, only a small group of models exhibiting certain characteristic features consistent with a pQCD picture of parton-medium interaction is found to be viable given the data. In this picture, the dominant mechanism is medium-induced radiation combined with a surprisingly small component of elastic energy transfer into the medium.