Centrality dependence of high energy jets in p+Pb collisions at the LHC

Understand

The recently measured centrality dependence of high energy jets in proton-lead collisions at the LHC is investigated.

• We hypothesize that events with jets of very high energy (a few hundred GeV) are characterized by a suppressed number of soft particles, thus shifting these events into more peripheral bins.
• This naturally results in the suppression (enhancement) of the nuclear modification factor, $R_{pA}$, in central (peripheral) collisions.
• Our calculations suggest that a moderate suppression of the order of $20\%$, for $10^{3}$ GeV jets, can quantitatively reproduce the experimental data.