Quark energy loss in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering of leptons on nuclei

Abstract

Semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering on nuclear targets is an ideal tool to study the energy loss effect of an outgoing quark in a nuclear medium. By means of the short hadron formation time, the experimental data with quark hadronization occurring outside the nucleus are picked out. A leading-order analysis is performed for the hadron multiplicity ratios as a function of the energy fraction on helium, neon, and copper nuclei relative to deuteron for the various identified hadrons. It is shown that the nuclear effects on parton distribution functions can be neglected. It is found that the theoretical results considering the nuclear modification of fragmentation functions due to quark energy loss are in good agreement with the experimental data. Whether the quark energy loss is linear or quadratic with the path length is not determined. The obtained energy loss per unit length is 0.38 \pm 0.03 GeV/fm for an outgoing quark by the global fit.

References in corpus (4)

• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Atomic Mass Dependence of Hadron Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering on Nuclei
• Nuclear parton distribution functions and energy loss effect in the Drell-Yan reaction off nuclei
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Systematic analysis of the incoming quark energy loss in cold nuclear matter
• Nuclear geometry effect and transport coefficient in semi-inclusive lepton-production of hadrons off nuclei
• Hadron formation in semi-inclusive deep inelastic lepton-nucleus scattering
• A systematic study of initial state quark energy loss in fixed target proton nucleus collision
• Atomic mass dependence of hadron production in semi-inclusive deep inelastic lepton-nucleus scattering
• Bjorken variable and scale dependence of quark transport coefficient in semi-inclusive lepton-production of hadron off nuclei
• Atomic mass, Bjorken variable and scale dependence of quark transport coefficient in Drell-Yan process for proton incident on nucleus
• Energy loss of charm quarks from $J/\psi$ production in cold nuclear matter