Abstract
We demonstrate that oxygen-oxygen collisions at the LHC provide unprecedented sensitivity to parton energy loss in a system whose size is comparable to those created in very peripheral heavy-ion collisions. With leading and next-to-leading order calculations of nuclear modification factors, we show that the baseline in the absence of partonic rescattering is known with up to 2% theoretical accuracy in inclusive oxygen-oxygen collisions. Surprisingly, a Z-boson normalized nuclear modification factor does not lead to higher theoretical accuracy within current uncertainties of nuclear parton distribution functions. We study a broad range of parton energy loss models and we find that the expected signal of partonic rescattering can be disentangled from the baseline by measuring charged hadron spectra in the range 20 GeV<p_{T}<100 GeV.
Highlights
With leading and next-to-leading order calculations of nuclear modification factors, we show that the baseline in the absence of partonic rescattering is known with up to 2% theoretical accuracy in inclusive oxygen-oxygen collisions
Opportunities of Z-boson measurements.—While our model studies indicate that the theoretical accuracy will be sufficient to discover partonic rescattering in small systems, the use of Eq (2) could potentially be limited by beam luminosity uncertainties
Summary.—We have started from the observation that the current characterization of parton energy loss in small systems relies on centrality dependent measurements whose construction depends on assumptions about soft physics
Summary
Alexander Huss ,1,* Aleksi Kurkela,1,2,† Aleksas Mazeliauskas ,1,‡ Risto Paatelainen ,1,§ Wilke van der Schee,1,∥ and Urs Achim Wiedemann 1,¶. Introduction.—Evidence for the formation of deconfined QCD matter—the quark-gluon plasma—in nucleusnucleus (AA) collisions at the LHC and at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider comes from several classes of experimental signatures: the suppression of high-momentum hadronic yields (“parton energy loss”), the momentum anisotropy seen in multiparticle correlations (“collective flow”), the increased fraction of strange hadron yields (“strangeness enhancement”), the exponential spectra of electromagnetic probes (“thermal radiation”), and others [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Several of these findings signal the presence of partonic rescattering in the QCD medium produced in AA collisions. The experimental testing of this robust prediction is arguably one of the most important challenges of the future experimental heavy-ion programs [15,16]
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