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Apr 13 – 16, 2021
US/Eastern timezone

Data-driven quark and gluon jet modification in heavy-ion collisions

Apr 15, 2021, 1:50 PM
20m
Oral Presentation Jets

Speaker

Jasmine Brewer (CERN)

Description

Whether quark- and gluon-initiated jets are modified differently by the quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions is a long-standing question that has thus far eluded a definitive experimental answer. A crucial complication for quark-gluon discrimination in both proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions is that all measurements necessarily average over the (unknown) quark-gluon composition of a jet sample. In the heavy-ion context, the simultaneous modification of both the fractions and substructure of quark and gluon jets by the quark-gluon plasma further obscures the interpretation. Here, we demonstrate a fully data-driven method for separating quark and gluon contributions to jet observables using a statistical technique called topic modeling. Assuming that jet distributions are a mixture of underlying "quark-like" and "gluon-like" distributions, we show how to extract quark and gluon jet fractions and constituent multiplicity distributions as a function of the jet transverse momentum. This proof-of-concept study is based on proton-proton and heavy-ion collision events from the Monte Carlo event generator Jewel with statistics accessible in Run 4 of the Large Hadron Collider. These results suggest the potential for an experimental determination of quark and gluon jet modifications.

Primary authors

Jasmine Brewer (CERN) Jesse Thaler (MIT) Andrew Turner

Presentation materials