English

A complete set of in-medium splitting functions to any order in opacity

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2019-06-19 v1 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

In this Letter we report the first calculation of all O(αs){\cal O}(\alpha_s) medium-induced branching processes to any order in opacity. Our splitting functions results are presented as iterative solutions to matrix equations with initial conditions set by the leading order branchings in the vacuum. The flavor and quark mass dependence of the in-medium qqgq \rightarrow qg, gggg\rightarrow gg, qgqq \rightarrow g q, gqqˉg \rightarrow q\bar{q} processes is fully captured by the light-front wavefunction formalism and the color representation of the parent and daughter partons. We include the explicit solutions to second order in opacity as supplementary material and present numerical results in a realistic strongly-interacting medium produced in high center-of-mass energy heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Our numerical simulations show that the second order in opacity corrections can change the energy dependence of the in-medium shower intensity. We further find corrections to the longitudinal and angular distributions of the in-medium splitting kernels that may have important implications for jet substructure phenomenology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.06170,
  title  = {A complete set of in-medium splitting functions to any order in opacity},
  author = {Matthew D. Sievert and Ivan Vitev and Boram Yoon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.06170},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table