Jet and heavy flavor production in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We review recent progress in the theoretical description of hard probes in heavy-ion collisions within the framework of Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET). Firstly, we consider the inclusive production of heavy flavor mesons and jets with a small radius parameter in proton-proton collisions. Secondly, we describe how in-medium effects can be incorporated consistently with the proton-proton baseline calculations. The in-medium interactions are described by Glauber gluon interactions. We present results for the nuclear modification factor RAA which is most commonly used to study the quenching of hadron or jet production yields in heavy-ion collisions and we compare to recent data from the LHC.