A Simultaneous Description of Hadron and Jet Suppression in Heavy Ion Collisions

Understand

We present a global fit to all data on the suppression of high energy jets and high energy hadrons in the most central heavy ion collisions at the LHC for two different collision energies, within a hybrid strong/weak coupling quenching model.

• Even though the measured suppression factors for hadrons and jets differ significantly from one another and appear to asymptote to different values in the high energy limit, we obtain a simultaneous description of all these data after constraining the value of a single model parameter.
• We use our model to investigate the origin of the difference between the observed suppression of jets and hadrons and relate it, quantitatively, to the observed modification of the jet fragmentation function in jets that have been modified by passage through the medium produced in heavy ion collisions.
• In particular, the observed increase in the fraction of hard fragments in medium-modified jets, which indicates that jets with the fewest hardest fragments lose the least energy, corresponds quantitatively to the observed difference between the suppression of hadrons and jets.