Importance of different energy loss effects in jet suppression at RHIC and LHC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the significance of various energy loss effects in jet suppression at RHIC and LHC, demonstrating that a combination of effects, especially dynamical scattering centers, is essential for accurate theoretical predictions matching experimental data.

Contribution

The study systematically assesses the individual importance of multiple energy loss effects within a dynamical formalism for jet suppression.

Findings

Dynamical scattering centers have the largest impact on predictions.

Multiple effects collectively improve agreement with experimental data.

Inclusion of all key ingredients is necessary for accurate suppression modeling.

Abstract

Jet suppression is considered to be an excellent probe of QCD matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Our theoretical predictions of jet suppression, which are based on our recently developed dynamical energy loss formalism, show a robust agreement with various experimental data, which spans across different probes, experiments (RHIC and LHC) and experimental conditions (i.e. all available centrality regions). This formalism includes several key ingredients, such as inclusion of dynamical scattering centers, finite size QCD medium, collisional energy loss, finite magnetic mass and running coupling. While these effects have to be included based on theoretical grounds, it is currently unclear what is their individual importance in accurately interpreting the experimental data, in particular because other approaches to suppression predictions commonly neglect some - or all - of these effects. To address this question, we here study the relative importance of these effects in obtaining accurate suppression predictions for D mesons (clear energy loss probe) at top RHIC and LHC energies. We obtain that several different ingredients are responsible for the accurate predictions, i.e. the robust agreement with the data is a cumulative effect of all the ingredients, though inclusion of the dynamical scattering centers has the largest relative importance.