Radial profile of bottom quarks in jets in high-energy nuclear collisions

TL;DR

This study investigates the radial distribution of bottom quarks in jets during high-energy nuclear collisions, revealing mass-dependent modifications and providing insights into in-medium partonic interactions in quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

First theoretical analysis of B meson radial profiles in jets in Pb+Pb collisions, combining NLO calculations with in-medium energy loss models to explore heavy flavor jet quenching effects.

Findings

Radial profiles of heavy flavors are sensitive to quark mass at low pT.

Jet quenching narrows B meson profiles but broadens D meson profiles in Pb+Pb collisions.

Competing effects of initial distribution narrowing and diffusion broadening influence radial profile modifications.

Abstract

Angular correlations between heavy quark (HQ) and its tagged jet are potentially new tools to gain insight into the in-medium partonic interactions in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In this work, we present the first theoretical study on the radial profiles of B mesons in jets in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC. The initial production of bottom quark tagged jet in p+p is computed by SHERPA which matches the next-to-leading order matrix elements with contributions of parton shower, whereas the massive quark traversing the QGP described by a Monte Carlo model SHELL which can simultaneously simulate light and heavy flavor in-medium energy loss within the framework of Langevin evolution. In p+p collisions, we find that at lower $p_T^Q$ the radial profiles of heavy flavors in jets are sensitive to the heavy quark mass. In $0-10\%$ Pb+Pb collisions at $\rm \sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV, we observe an inverse modification pattern of the B mesons radial profiles in jets at $\rm 4<p_T^Q<20$ GeV compared to that of D mesons: the jet quenching effects narrow the jet radial profile of B mesons in jets while broaden that of D mesons in jets. We find that in A+A collisions, the contribution dissipated from the higher $\rm p_T^Q> 20$ GeV region naturally has a narrower initial distribution and consequently leads to a narrower modification pattern of radial profile; however the diffusion nature of the heavy flavor in-medium interactions will give rise to a broader modification pattern of radial profile. These two effects consequently compete and offset with each other, and the b quarks in jets benefit more from the former and suffers less diffusion effect compared to that of c quarks in jets. These findings can be tested in the future experimental measurements at the LHC to gain better understanding of the mass effect of jet quenching.