Simultaneous description of hadron and jet suppression in heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

We present a global fit to all data on the suppression of high-energy jets and high-energy hadrons in the most central heavy-ion collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for two different collision energies, within a hybrid strong-weak coupling quenching model. Even though the measured suppression factors for hadrons and jets differ significantly from one another and appear to asymptote to different values in the high-energy limit, we obtain a simultaneous description of all these data after constraining the value of a single model parameter. We use our model to investigate the origin of the difference between the observed suppression of jets and hadrons and relate it, quantitatively, to the observed modification of the jet fragmentation function in jets that have been modified by passage through the medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. In particular, the observed increase in the fraction of hard fragments in medium-modified jets, which indicates that jets with the fewest hardest fragments lose the least energy, corresponds quantitatively to the observed difference between the suppression of hadrons and jets. We argue that a harder fragmentation pattern for jets with a given energy after quenching is a generic feature of any mechanism for the interaction between jets and the medium that they traverse that yields a larger suppression for wider jets. We also compare the results of our global fit to LHC data to measurements of the suppression of high-energy hadrons in BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) collisions, and find that with its parameter chosen to fit the LHC data, our model is inconsistent with the RHIC data at the 3σ level, suggesting that hard probes interact more strongly with the less hot quark-gluon plasma produced at RHIC.