Effects of jet quenching on the hydrodynamical evolution of quark-gluon plasma
Abstract
We study the effects of jet quenching on the hydrodynamical evolution of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) fluid created in a heavy-ion collision. In jet quenching, a hard QCD parton, before fragmenting into a jet of hadrons, deposits a fraction of its energy in the medium, leading to suppressed production of high-pT hadrons. Assuming that the deposited energy quickly thermalizes, we simulate the subsequent hydrodynamic evolution of the QGP fluid. For partons moving at supersonic speed, v_p > c_s, and sufficiently large energy loss, a shock wave forms leading to conical flow [1]. The PHENIX Collaboration recently suggested that observed structures in the azimuthal angle distribution [2] might be caused by conical flow. We show here that conical flow produces different angular structures than predicted in [1] and that, for phenomenologically acceptable values of parton energy loss, conical flow effects are too weak to explain the structures seen by PHENIX [2].
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.nucl-th/0503028,
title = {Effects of jet quenching on the hydrodynamical evolution of quark-gluon plasma},
author = {A. K. Chaudhuri and Ulrich W. Heinz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:nucl-th/0503028},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures. Last figure changed, now showing angular distribution of pions instead of photons. Added comments on "lost jets" and pT-dependence of angular correlations