Abstract
The production of jets associated to bottom quarks is measured for the first time in PbPb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair. Jet spectra are reported in the transverse momentum (p(T)) range of 80-250 GeV/c, and within pseudorapidity |η|<2. The nuclear modification factor (R(AA)) calculated from these spectra shows a strong suppression in the b-jet yield in PbPb collisions relative to the yield observed in pp collisions at the same energy. The suppression persists to the largest values of p(T) studied, and is centrality dependent. The R(AA) is about 0.4 in the most central events, similar to previous observations for inclusive jets. This implies that jet quenching does not have a strong dependence on parton mass and flavor in the jet p(T) range studied.
Highlights
By colliding heavy nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one expects to reach sufficiently large energy densities to form a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state which is characterized by effective deconfinement of the quarks and gluons [1,2,3]
The strongly coupled nature of the QGP may introduce mass effects, according to a description of jet quenching based on the AdS-CFT correspondence [25,26]
We note that b jets from gluon splitting comprise about 30–35% of the total b-jet cross section according to PYTHIA simulations, measurements of b − bangular correlations at 7 TeV indicate that the contribution is somewhat larger [34]
Summary
By colliding heavy nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one expects to reach sufficiently large energy densities to form a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state which is characterized by effective deconfinement of the quarks and gluons [1,2,3]. The quenching of jets in heavy-ion collisions is expected to depend upon the flavor of the fragmenting parton. Through comparisons with the existing measurements of inclusive jet production [31], b-jet measurements can be used to study the flavor dependence of jet quenching, which in turn provides insight on the dynamics of parton energy loss.
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