Gluon Spectrum to Any Order in Opacity for Jets at the EIC

Abstract

Jets produced at a future electron-ion collider (EIC) are predominantly initiated by energetic quarks, and the subsequent branching of these quarks into systems of quarks and gluons is heavily modified by multiple scattering in the nuclear medium. In cold nuclear matter and in the quark-gluon plasma, this feature allows jet cross sections and jet substructure to be used as a probe of the medium's properties. Here we present a formalism for computing the gluon substructure of a quark jet to an arbitrary order in opacity, the average number of scatterings in the medium, while maintaining the exact kinematics of the splitting. We present explicit results at second order in opacity for the first time, along with a recursion relation which can be used to construct the solution for arbitrarily high orders in opacity. The theoretical framework demonstrated here applies equally well to light and heavy quark branching, and is easily generalizable to other systems.