Effect of meson cloud on the jet nuclear modification factor in $pA$ collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the nucleon meson cloud influences the centrality dependence of the jet nuclear modification factor in proton-nucleus collisions, revealing a potential source of deviations observed experimentally.

Contribution

It introduces the consideration of meson-baryon Fock components in modeling $R_{pA}$, showing their impact on jet suppression and enhancement across collision centralities.

Findings

Meson cloud causes deviations of $R_{pA}$ from unity.

Results align qualitatively with ATLAS data.

Effect size is smaller than observed in experiments.

Abstract

We study the effect of the nucleon meson cloud on centrality dependence of the jet nuclear modification factor $R_{pA}$. We find that the meson-baryon Fock components may lead to a noticeable deviation of $R_{pA}$ from unity. Our results for $R_{pA}$ show the same tendency as that observed by ATLAS in $p+Pb$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV. The meson cloud suppresses the central jet events and enhances the peripheral jet events. But quantitatively the effect is somewhat smaller than in the data.