Jet quenching in the hadron gas: an exploratory study

TL;DR

This study investigates how late-stage hadronic interactions affect jet quenching signals in heavy-ion collisions, providing parametrizations to incorporate these effects into future models.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of hadronic phase effects on jet quenching using the SMASH transport approach, including diffusion coefficients and simplified modeling.

Findings

Hadronic interactions can be approximated by a pion gas with constant cross-sections.

Temperature and energy dependence of diffusion coefficients are quantified.

Parametrizations for hadronic effects in jet quenching models are provided.

Abstract

The suppression of high momentum particles in heavy-ion collisions in comparison to elementary reactions is one of the main indications for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma. In recent studies, full jets are being reconstructed and substructure observables are gaining importance in assessing the medium modifications of hard probes. In this work, the effect of the late stage hadronic interactions are explored within the hadronic transport approach SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). High momentum particles are incorporated in a radially expanding hadron gas to analyse the corresponding angular distributions, also refered to as `jet shape' observables. We find that the full hadron gas can be approximated with a pion gas with constant elastic cross-sections of 100 mb. In addition, the temperature and probe energy dependence of diffusion coefficients $\tilde{q}$ and $\tilde{e}$ quantifying the transverse and parallel momentum transfers are extracted. The species dependence and the importance of different interaction types are investigated. Parametrizations are presented that can be employed in future jet quenching calculations to include the effect of the hadronic phase.