Ab Initio Coupling of Jets to Collective Flow in the Opacity Expansion Approach

TL;DR

This paper calculates first-order corrections to jet momentum broadening and radiation due to medium flow and gradients, enhancing understanding of jet quenching in dynamic nuclear environments.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate medium velocity and gradient effects into jet quenching calculations using scalar QCD, applicable to various processes.

Findings

Flow induces anisotropic transverse momentum diffusion.

Flow causes anisotropic medium-induced radiation.

Gradient effects modify jet broadening and radiation patterns.

Abstract

We calculate the leading corrections to jet momentum broadening and medium-induced branching that arise from the velocity of the moving medium at first order in opacity. These results advance our knowledge of jet quenching and demonstrate how it couples to collective flow of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions and to the orbital motion of partons in cold nuclear matter in deep inelastic scattering at the electron-ion collider. We also compute the leading corrections to jet momentum broadening due to transverse gradients of temperature and density. We find that these effects lead to both anisotropic transverse momentum diffusion proportional to the medium velocity and anisotropic medium-induced radiation emitted preferentially in the direction of the flow. We isolate the relevant sub-eikonal corrections by working with jets composed of scalar particles with arbitrary color factors interacting with the medium by scalar QCD. Appropriate substitution of the color factors and light-front wave functions allow us to immediately apply the results to a range of processes including $q \rightarrow q g$ branching in real QCD. The resulting general expressions can be directly coupled to hydrodynamic simulations on an event-by-event basis to study the correlations between jet quenching and the dynamics of various forms of nuclear matter.