Jets in d(p)-A Collisions: Color Transparency or Energy Conservation

Understand

The production of jets, and high momentum hadrons from jets, produced in deuteron ($d$)-$Au$ collisions at the relativistic heavy-ion collider (RHIC) and proton ($p$)-$Pb$ collisions at the large hadron collider (LHC) are studied as a function of centrality, a measure of the impact parameter of the collision.

• A modified version of the event generator PYTHIA, widely used to simulate $p$-$p$ collisions, is used in conjunction with a nuclear Monte-Carlo event generator which simulates the locations of the nucleons within a large nucleus.
• We demonstrate how events with a hard jet may be simulated, in such a way that the parton distribution function of the projectile is frozen during its interaction with the extended nucleus.
• Using our approach, we demonstrate that the puzzling enhancement seen in peripheral events at RHIC and the LHC, as well as the suppression seen in central events at the LHC are mainly due to mis-binning of central and semi-central events, containing a jet, as peripheral events.