Abstract

Recent surprising discoveries of collective behaviour of low-pT particles in pA collisions at LHC hint at the creation of a hot, fluid-like QGP medium. The seemingly conflicting measurements of non-zero particle correlations and RpA that appears to be consistent with unity demand a more careful analysis of the mechanisms at work in such ostensibly minuscule systems. We study the way in which energy is dissipated in the QGP created in pA collisions by calculating, in pQCD, the short separation distance corrections to the well-known DGLV energy loss formulae that have produced excellent predictions for AA collisions. We find that, shockingly, the large formation time (compared to the 1/μ Debye screening length) assumption that was used in the original DGLV calculation, results in a highly non-trivial cancellation of correction terms. We investigate the effect of relaxing the large formation time assumption in the final stages of the calculation and find that, not only is the effect of the small separation distance correction important even in large (~ 5 fm) systems, but also that the correction term dominates over the leading term at high energies.

Highlights

  • 1.1 MotivationWhile the SKA will soon be pushing the boundaries of South African physics, particle physics rivals cosmology on the global stage as one of the most fruitful fields of discovery physics, and it is truly the heavy ion particle physicists that are pulling down the veil of obscurity surrounding the underlying structure of the universe humanity finds itself in

  • The heavy ion community has all but universally accepted that a new state of matter is routinely created in colossal particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva [10], Switzerland and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) [11] at Brookhaven National Labratory (BNL) in the United States

  • Our naıve approach was to equate the concept of a small system to the idea of small separation distances, justified by the intuition that if energy loss occurs in a short, thin medium, the distance between production and scattering of the hard parton must necessarily be small as well

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Summary

Introduction

1.1 MotivationWhile the SKA will soon be pushing the boundaries of South African physics, particle physics rivals cosmology on the global stage as one of the most fruitful fields of discovery physics, and it is truly the heavy ion particle physicists that are pulling down the veil of obscurity surrounding the underlying structure of the universe humanity finds itself in. The heavy ion community has all but universally accepted that a new state of matter is routinely created in colossal particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva [10], Switzerland and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) [11] at Brookhaven National Labratory (BNL) in the United States. This new state of matter, called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), is thought to be a deconfined state of the most fundamental constituents of matter, quarks and gluons, that is brought about by the extreme temperatures and energy densities created by colliding heavy nuclei like gold at RHIC and lead at LHC at ultra-relativistic energies. The dual phenomena of elliptic (and higher order) flow of soft (or low transverse momentum, pT ) observables and the quenching of hard (or high pT ) observables are expected wherever a hot medium is created [10]

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