Speaker
Description
Title:
Understanding the hadron- and photon-triggered jet acoplanarity enhancement with thermal recoil jets
Abstract:
In the established paradigm of jet quenching in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, jets from initial hard parton scatterings are suppressed due to their interaction with the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), serving as crucial tomographic probes of QGP properties. Within the linear Boltzmann transport model, we find that the QGP is also capable of absorbing and reprocessing energy deposited by the hard jets into emergent jet-like objects, providing an alternative production mechanism of thermal recoil jets. These emergent thermal recoil jets exhibit distinct transverse momentum (pT) and jet cone size (R) dependencies different from the hard jets, and explain the puzzling RHIC and LHC observations of the enhanced yields of hadron- and photon-triggered jets at large azimuthal angle relative to the away side but solely for jets with low pT and large R. Markedly different behavior is predicted for hadron-triggered heavy-flavor jets, since the hard production of heavy quarks suppresses the thermal production of jets. The thermal recoil jets are predicted to have unique substructures, such as a jet shape that increases with radius, a thermal-like distribution of their constituents, and a large-angle enhancement in their energy-energy correlators, which await verification in future experimental analyses.
Brief introduction about the speaker:
Shanshan Cao is a professor at Southeast University. He received his B.Sc. degree from Nanjing University in 2009 and Ph.D. degree from Duke University in 2014. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Wayne State University from 2014 to 2020, and a professor at Shandong University from 2020 to 2026. His research focuses on theoretical high-energy nuclear physics, including jet and heavy-flavor physics in the Quark-Gluon Plasma.
