Collective effects like elliptic and triangular flow have been observed in small system collisions and found to be consistent with the formation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) droplets. Corresponding changes in the nuclear modification factor, $R_{xA}$ however, became controversial, because they depend on certain model assumptions when mapping event activity on collision geometry. Using direct...
High-energy jets are produced by the fragmentation of partons (quarks and gluons) that underwent hard scattering in the early stages of a collision. For quite a number of years, jets have been successfully used to probe the properties of the special form of matter, the quark gluon plasma (QGP), formed in high-energy heavy ion collisions. One of the most recognized signatures of the QGP, the...
Experimental exploration of small systems has produced several observables that indicate the existence of non-negligible correlations between hard and soft dynamics. When studying heavy ion collisions, the initial conditions and early stages of the bulk evolution are assumed independent of the dynamics of jets and high-$p_T$ partons. For such large systems, the production of rare high-$p_T$...
Jet quenching is an established signature of parton-medium interactions in Quark-Gluon Plasma. These interactions are expected to be influenced by the color charge, flavor, and/or mass of the propagating parton. To investigate this relationship, we look for possible differences in quenching for jets originating from heavy quarks compared to inclusive jets. Heavy partons tend to transfer more...
The mass of heavy quarks modifies the radiation pattern of heavy-quark jets in comparison to their light quark counterparts, since the heavy quark mass effectively regularizes the soft and collinear divergences that would normally dominate the partonic cascade formation. This leads to the depletion of collinear gluon emissions relative to the heavy quark, an effect known as the dead cone...
The substructure of bottom quark jets is of substantial interest, both in vacuum and in medium, in terms of understanding radiation emitted from heavy quarks. Unfortunately, the decays of b hadrons, which are typically cascading, obscure the parton level branching, by filling the radiative dead cone. To circumvent this, one may study exclusive b-hadron decays, but one then sacrifices the vast...
The quenching of light and heavy flavor hadrons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions probes the color and flavor dependences of parton energy loss through a color-deconfined quark-gluon plasma (QGP), and thus offers an important test of QCD-based calculation at extremely high density and temperature. By combining a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculation of parton production, a...