A Study of Azimuthal Z-Jet Momentum Imbalance in Monte Carlo PbPb Collisions at Sqrt(Snn)
Author: Stephen Keeton
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 158
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJets have long been used as an effective probe for exploring the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in high energy collisions of nuclei [1]. In heavy ion collisions some nucleons will undergo hard scattering, breaking apart and releasing their constituent high transverse momentum partons. These partons undergo hadronization due to the phenomenon of colour confinement. This is a process in which, as the constituent partons separate, the strong coupling constant increases until there is enough potential energy for it to be more energetically favourable to produce a quark-antiquark pair. This radiates more partons, predominantly collinear with their parent, forming jets of particles. As the energy of these particles decrease they will form colourless hadrons which can be detected. We set out with the aim to establish a groundwork for measuring the shape of the QGP by examining the energy loss of jets with respect to the azimuthal angle. By examining Z+jet events we aim to accurately measure the jet energy lost through jet quenching in the QGP. We expect jets which have traversed a larger distance in the QGP to lose more energy and thus an azimuthal anisotropy of jet energy loss will give us information on the shape of the produced QGP. While the latest run at the LHC did not yield many Z events from PbPb collisions [2] the next run should provide the data necessary for a complete analysis of this type. We will make use of a dijet enhanced Monte Carlo (MC) dataset in order to plan out the process and collect preliminary results.