Phenomenological study of the angle between jet axes in heavy-ion collisions

This paper presents a phenomenological study on the angle between the Standard and the Winner-Take-All (WTA) jet axes ($\Delta R_{{\rm axis}}^{{\rm WTA-Std}}$) in high-energy nuclear collisions. The $p$+$p$ baseline is provided by the Pythia8 event generator. The in-medium jet propagation is simulated by the linear Boltzmann transport (LBT) model, which considers both the elastic and inelastic jet-medium interactions. Our theoretical results calculated by the LBT model show that the $\Delta R_{{\rm axis}}^{{\rm WTA-Std}}$ distribution in Pb+Pb at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV is narrower than that in $p$+$p$, which agrees well with the recent ALICE measurements. The narrowing of $\Delta R_{{\rm axis}}^{{\rm WTA-Std}}$ seems to violate the $p_T$-broadening nature of the jet quenching effect, usually explained by the influence of "selection bias". However, the physical details still need to be fully understood. Utilizing a matching-jet method to track the jet evolution in the QGP to remove the selection bias in the Monte Carlo simulations, we observe that the $\Delta R_{{\rm axis}}^{{\rm WTA-Std}}$ distribution becomes broader due to the jet-medium interactions. At the same time, by rescaling the quark/gluon-jet fractions in Pb+Pb collisions to be the same as that in $p$+$p$, we find that the fraction change may not significantly influence the modification pattern of jet $\Delta R_{{\rm axis}}^{{\rm WTA-Std}}$. On the other hand, the selected jet sample in A+A collisions has a significantly narrower initial $\Delta R_{{\rm axis}}^{{\rm WTA-Std}}$ distribution than the $p$+$p$ baseline, and such a biased comparison between $p$+$p$ and A+A conceals the actual jet-broadening effect in the experimental measurements. The investigations presented in this paper will deepen our understanding of the relationship between the actual intra-jet modifications in the QGP and the experimental observations.