Virtual Journal on QCD Matter

The ATLAS Collaboration released its first result from Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC, and it’s a blockbuster. Their new paper, titled Observation of a Centrality-Dependent Dijet Asymmetry in Lead-Lead Collisions at √s_NN = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC, has been fast-tracked for acceptance in Physical Review Letters. In this paper ATLAS reports the observation of strong quenching in highly energetic jets (> 100 GeV) produced in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC. The quenching is sufficiently strong that the trigger jet may properly be referred to as a monojet.

The effect is clearly seen in Figure 1 of their paper, reproduced above. The high  p_T towers that dominate the Lego plot and the event display are unbalanced by a partner jet on the away side in azimuth. Instead, their appears to be enhanced low p emission over nearly the entire away side azimuthal distribution, mostly clearly seen in the towers of the beams-eye view event display.

A more quantitative analysis is of course provided in the paper, in which the evolution of the quenching is presented as a function of centrality, and also compared to HIJING events supplemented with unquenched jets from PYTHIA. For peripheral events, both the the energy asymmetry of the away-side jet and the distribution in azimuthal angle is in good agreement with those seen in p+p events and in the HIJING+PYTHIA Monte Carlo events. This is in sharp distinction to the most central Pb+Pb events, where the jet events have a pronounced asymmetry in energy and a significantly broadened angular distribution.

Of course, the disappearance of the away-side “jet” was discovered by the STAR collaboration in data collected during the first full energy RHIC run. But several aspects of the ATLAS result are even more striking: The observed quenching is for true jets, fully reconstructed in heavy ion events with complete and essentially hermetic hadronic calorimetry; the quenching remains to jet energies of (at least) 100 GeV; and the modification of the jet azimuthal energy distribution is clearly observed in the away-size distribution from the trigger jet. These are all firsts in heavy ion physics, and to see them in a Physical Review Letter a few days after the start of heavy ion physics running at the LHC is indeed remarkable.

The ATLAS results is featured in a CERN press release, dated today (26-Nov-10), where it is stated a similar result from CMS will follow shortly. Also posted today is a Symmetry Magazine article on the ATLAS result containing comments by Brian Cole and Peter Steinberg.

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On September 21st 2010 the CMS Collaboration gave a seminar at CERN detailing the observation of long-range near-side angular correlations in p+p collisions at the LHC. A preprint was submitted to arXiv the same day:

Observation of Long-Range Near-Side Angular Correlations in Proton-Proton Collisions at the LHC

The significance of these two particle correlations in azimuthal angle and pseudo-rapidity space is that they are thought to be the result of a collective, hydrodynamic, response of a medium to fluctuations of a multi-particle initial state. The medium in question of course most likely being a Quark-Gluon-Plasma. (more…)

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The 21st International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions, colloquially referred to as Quark Matter 2009, took place in Knoxville, Tennessee from March 30th to April 4th, 2009. (more…)

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A wide variety of thermodynamic and/or statistical techniques have been applied to describe particle spectra and yields in relativistic heavy ion collisions. Not having done  a detailed, ‘statistical’ analysis of the hundreds of such papers, it is still safe to say the vast majority of such calculations do not start from the microcanonical ensemble, that is, they do not incorporate the effects of global energy-momentum conservation.  In Conservation Laws and the Multiplicity Evolution of Spectra at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Chajecki and Lisa study the role of Energy and Momentum Conservation-Induced Constraints (EMCIC’s) on single particle spectra at RHIC.  (In a nice piece of acronym-overloading, this work builds on their previous studies of Energy and Momentum Conservation-Induced Correlations in femtoscopic measurements.) Their studies suggest that the effects of EMCIC’s can lead to surprisingly large shifts in the momentum distributions between low and high multiplicity states. 

There is additional information in this figure that the authors may wish to extract. This low momentum regime is where one expects participant scaling to hold, and this seems to be (roughly) the case for the lowest momentum pions, but is badly violated for the protons. Protons with  p_T < 0.7 GeV/c are suppressed in Au+Au collisions relative to participant scaling; protons with momenta greater than this value are enhanced. The conventional explanation for this is radial flow, which has a larger effect on higher mass particles, and which will lead to a depletion of the low  p_T region. This paper suggests that identical trends can result from EMCIC’s, leading the authors to state “Extracting physics messages from the changing spectra, while ignoring kinematic effects of the same order as the observed changes themselves, seems unjustified.”

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Over the past few months a new initiative, called Theory-Experiment Collaboration for Hot QCD Matter (TECHQM), has taken shape, which potentially will have great impact on how our community arrives at scientific conclusions on the nature and properties of hot and dense QCD matter created at the RHIC and LHC facilities. (more…)

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The discovery of the “ridge” by the STAR Collaboration has proven stubbornly resistant to quantitative theoretical analysis. (See Berndt Mueller’s “Theorists Confront the Ridge” for a description of two recent attempts.) The discovery turns out to be nearly as resistant to historical analysis, at least for this outside observer. (more…)

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Over the past 1-2 years some confusion has entered the field as to what exactly constitutes the elliptic flow scaling law predicted by the parton recombination models. (more…)

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The detailed dependence of the elliptic flow parameter v₂ on the particle masses and transverse momentum has provided strong evidence for the applicability of hydrodynamics for describing the bulk motion of final-state particles at RHIC. (For a partial list of references, see the Hydro Primer elsewhere in this journal.) Equally intriguing have been various scaling patterns observed in the flow data: The separate curves v₂(p_T,m) for different mass particles are substantially more alike when studied versus “transvese kinetic energy” KE_T = m_T -m. Plotting v₂ as as a function of KE_T collapses the data into one curve for KE_T < 1 GeV, while showing two distinct branches for mesons and baryons for larger values of KE_T. These two branches collapse into one curve when both v₂ and KE_T are divided by the quark content n_q (2 for mesons, 3 for baryons). (more…)

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The one that started it all was the first experimental paper from RHIC. (more…)

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