QCD jets in matter: new techniques and new measurements

by Peter Jakobs (LAWRENCE BERKELEY NAT. LAB.)

Friday 8 Sept 2017, 14:30 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Leale (LNF INFN)

Jets, the observable remnants of energetic quarks and gluons, are fundamental objects in QCD. Jets in elementary collisions provide essential, precise tools for the study of the Standard Model and beyond, thanks to decades of development in both theory and experimental methods. In nuclear collisions at collider energies, jets are used to probe hot QCD matter though modification of their production rates and internal structure. However, jet measurements in the complex environment of nuclear collisions require new techniques, to suppress the huge uncorrelated background in such events without imposing bias on the measured distributions. Indeed, one of the most interesting and sensitive jet measurements in heavy-ion collisions is the secondary scattering of low energy jets in the Quark-Gluon Plasma, which is especially challenging due to very small signal/background. I will discuss new approaches to accurate, unbiased jet measurements over the full jet phase space in nuclear collisions, with application to data from the ALICE experiment at the LHC and the STAR experiment at RHIC. I will also discuss the potential application of these techniques to BSM measurements in proton-proton collisions, in the high luminosity era of the LHC.