Centrality dependence of high energy jets in p+Pb collisions at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how high-energy jets in proton-lead collisions at the LHC depend on collision centrality, proposing that jet energy influences soft particle production and nuclear modification factors, with calculations matching experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a hypothesis linking jet energy to soft particle suppression, providing a quantitative model that explains centrality dependence of jet suppression in p+Pb collisions.

Findings

Moderate suppression (~20%) for 1000 GeV jets reproduces data.

Jet energy affects soft particle production and centrality classification.

Model aligns with experimental nuclear modification factor measurements.

Abstract

The recently measured centrality dependence of high energy jets in proton-lead collisions at the LHC is investigated. We hypothesize that events with jets of very high energy (a few hundred GeV) are characterized by a suppressed number of soft particles, thus shifting these events into more peripheral bins. This naturally results in the suppression (enhancement) of the nuclear modification factor, $R_{pA}$, in central (peripheral) collisions. Our calculations suggest that a moderate suppression of the order of $20\%$, for $10^{3}$ GeV jets, can quantitatively reproduce the experimental data. We further extract the suppression factor as a function of jet energy and test our conjecture using available $R_{pA}$ data for various centralities.