Abstract
Cold nuclear matter effects in reactions with nuclei at a future electron-ion collider (EIC) lead to a modification of semi-inclusive hadron production, jet cross sections, and jet substructure when compared to the vacuum. At leading order in the strong coupling, a jet produced at an EIC is initiated as an energetic quark, and the process of this quark splitting into a quark-gluon system underlies experimental observables. The spectrum of gluons associated with the branching of this quark jet is heavily modified by multiple scattering in a medium, allowing jet cross sections and jet substructure to be used as a probe of the medium's properties. We present a formalism that allows us to compute the gluon spectrum of a quark jet to an arbitrary order in opacity, the average number of scatterings in the medium. This calculation goes beyond the simplifying limit in which the gluon radiation is soft and can be interpreted as energy loss of the quark, and it significantly extends previous work which computes the full gluon spectrum only to first order in opacity. The theoretical framework demonstrated here applies equally well to light parton and heavy quark branching, and is easily generalizable to all in-medium splitting processes.
Highlights
The attenuation of the production cross section of energetic particles and jets in high-energy reactions with nuclei is one of the primary signatures of inelastic parton scattering in dense nuclear matter [1,2]
Initial efforts have focused on the energy loss of energetic quarks and gluons as they propagate in the quark-gluon plasma, a deconfined state of strongly interacting matter that existed in the early
Radiative energy loss in QCD is synonymous with soft gluon bremsstrahlung, a process in which hard quarks and gluons shed energy in small quanta during propagation through matter
Summary
The attenuation of the production cross section of energetic particles and jets in high-energy reactions with nuclei is one of the primary signatures of inelastic parton scattering in dense nuclear matter [1,2]. The rapid development of heavy-ion programs at fixed-target and collider experiments fueled tremendous interest in medium-induced bremsstrahlung processes and radiative parton energy loss in QCD [3], often discussed in analogy with the LandauPomeranchuk-Migdal effect for photon emission in QED [4,5]. To this effect, initial efforts have focused on the energy loss of energetic quarks and gluons as they propagate in the quark-gluon plasma, a deconfined state of strongly interacting matter that existed in the early. This does not preclude the possibility that it may dissipate a sizable fraction of its
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