English

Where is the jet quenching in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 AGeV?

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-10-31 v2 Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

Because of the rapidly falling particle spectrum at large pTp_T from jet fragmentation at the CERN SPS energy, the high-pTp_T hadron distribution should be highly sensitive to parton energy loss inside a dense medium as predicted by recent perturbative QCD (pQCD) studies. A careful analysis of recent data from CERN SPS experiments via pQCD calculation shows little evidence of energy loss. This implies that either the life-time of the dense partonic matter is very short or one has to re-think about the problem of parton energy loss in dense matter. The hadronic matter does not seem to cause jet quenching in Pb+PbPb+Pb collisions at the CERN SPS. High-pTp_T two particle correlation in the azimuthal angle is proposed to further clarify this issue.

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/9804384,
  title  = {Where is the jet quenching in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 AGeV?},
  author = {Xin-Nian Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/9804384},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages with 2 ps figures. Minors changes are made in the text with updated references. Revised version to appear in Phys. Rev. Letters