Centrality dependence of high energy jets inp+Pbcollisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The recently measured centrality dependence of high energy jets in proton-lead collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is investigated. We hypothesize that events with jets of very high energy (a few hundred GeV) are characterized by a suppressed number of soft particles, thus shifting these events into more peripheral bins. This naturally results in the suppression (enhancement) of the nuclear modification factor, ${R}_{pA}$, in central (peripheral) collisions. Our calculations suggest that a moderate suppression of the order of $20%$, for ${10}^{3}$ GeV jets, can quantitatively reproduce the experimental data. We further extract the suppression factor as a function of jet energy and test our conjecture using available ${R}_{pA}$ data for various centralities.