Importance of different energy loss effects in jet suppression at the RHIC and the LHC

Abstract

Jet suppression is considered to be an excellent probe of quantum chromodynamic (QCD) matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Our theoretical predictions of jet suppression, which are based on our recently developed dynamical energy loss formalism, show a robust agreement with various experimental data, which spans across different probes, experiments (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC)) and experimental conditions (i.e. all available centrality regions). This formalism includes several key ingredients, such as the inclusion of dynamical scattering centers, a finite size QCD medium, collisional energy loss, finite magnetic mass and running coupling. While these effects have to be included based on theoretical grounds, it is currently unclear what their individual importance is in accurately interpreting the experimental data; in particular because other approaches to suppression predictions commonly neglect some—or all—of these effects. To address this question, we study the relative importance of these effects in obtaining accurate suppression predictions for D mesons (clear energy loss probe) at top RHIC and LHC energies. We obtain that several different ingredients are responsible for accurate predictions, i.e. robust agreement with the data is a cumulative effect of all the ingredients, though inclusion of the dynamical scattering centers has the largest relative importance.