Resolution Effects in the Hybrid Strong/Weak Coupling Model

Understand

Within the context of a hybrid strong/weak coupling model of jet quenching, we study the consequences of the fact that the plasma produced in a heavy ion collision cannot resolve the substructure of a collimated parton shower propagating through it with arbitrarily fine spatial resolution.

• We introduce a screening length parameter, $L_{\rm res}$, proportional to the inverse of the local temperature in the plasma, estimating a range for the value of the proportionality constant via comparing weakly coupled QCD calculations and holographic calculations appropriate in strongly coupled plasma.
• We then modify the hybrid model so that when a parton in a jet shower splits, its two offspring are initially treated as unresolved, and are only treated as two separate partons losing energy independently after they are separated by a distance $L_{\rm res}$.
• This modification delays the quenching of partons with intermediate energy, resulting in the survival of more hadrons in the final state with $p_T$ in the several GeV range.