Extraction of Correlated Jet Pair Signals in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Understand

Multi-particle correlation techniques are frequently used to study jet shapes and yields in hadronic and nuclear collisions.

• To date, a standard assumption applied in such analyses is that the observed correlations arise from either jets and associated hard scattering phenomena, or from a background component due to combinatorial pairs connected only through whole even correlations.
• Within this assumption of two essentially independent sources, a fundamental problem centers around determining the relative contributions of each component.
• We discuss the methods commonly used to establish the background yield in jet correlation analyses, with a full explanation of the absolute background normalization technique which establishes the background yield without assumptions about the shape of jet correlations.