Signatures of Jet Drift in QGP Hard Probe Observables

TL;DR

This paper investigates how sub-eikonal, collective-flow-induced jet drift affects jet observables in heavy ion collisions, revealing significant modifications to elliptic flow and acoplanarity that encode new information about QGP dynamics.

Contribution

It presents the first study of jet drift effects at the sub-eikonal level in PbPb collisions using the APE framework, highlighting their impact on hard probe observables.

Findings

Jet drift enhances elliptic flow ($v_2$) in heavy ion collisions.

Jet drift increases mean acoplanarity for low and intermediate $p_T$ particles.

These effects persist after averaging over events and collision geometry.

Abstract

Hard probe tomography of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in heavy ion collisions has long been a preeminent goal of the high-energy nuclear physics program. In service of this goal, the isotropic modification of jets and high-energy hadrons has been studied in great detail at the leading-power (eikonal) level, with effects originating from sub-eikonal $\mathcal{O}(\mu/E)$ anisotropic interactions presumed to be small. We present the first investigation of sub-eikonal, collective-flow-induced asymmetric jet broadening (jet drift) in event-by-event $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV PbPb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider using the new Anisotropic Parton Evolution (APE) computational framework. We show that jet drift imparts a sizeable enhancement of elliptic flow ($v_2$) and increases the mean acoplanarity for low and intermediate energy particles ($p_T < 10$ GeV). Importantly, these novel modifications to hard probe observables are shown to survive averaging over events and collision geometry. They couple to the collective flow of the medium seen by the jet and encode information about the QGP dynamics inaccessible to studies considering only isotropic, eikonal level effects.