https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2319-8
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Jet fragmentation function moments in heavy ion collisions
1
LPTHE, UPMC Univ. Paris 6 and CNRS UMR 7589, Paris, France
2
Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France
3
Department of Physics, Theory Unit, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
4
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA
5
Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA Saclay, CNRS URA 2306, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
* e-mail: gregory.soyez@cea.fr
Received:
9
October
2012
Revised:
7
January
2013
Published online:
1
March
2013
The nature of a jet’s fragmentation in heavy-ion collisions has the potential to cast light on the mechanism of jet quenching. However, the presence of the huge underlying event complicates the reconstruction of the jet fragmentation function as a function of the momentum fraction z of hadrons in the jet. Here we propose the use of moments of the fragmentation function. These quantities appear to be as sensitive to quenching modifications as the fragmentation function directly in z. We show that they are amenable to background subtraction using the same jet-area-based techniques proposed in the past for jet p t ’s. Furthermore, complications due to correlations between background-fluctuation contributions to the jet’s p t and to its particle content are easily corrected for.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and Società Italiana di Fisica, 2013
