No-quenching baseline for energy loss signals in oxygen-oxygen collisions

Abstract

In this work, we perform computations of inclusive jet, and semi-inclusive jet-hadron cross sections for minimum bias oxygen-oxygen collisions at RHIC and LHC collision energies. We compute the no-quenching baseline for the jet nuclear modification factor $R_{\mathrm{AA}}$ and jet-, and hadron-triggered semi-inclusive nuclear modification factors $I_{\mathrm{AA}}$. We do this with state-of-the-art nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs), next-to-leading-order matrix elements, parton shower, and hadronization. We observe deviations from unity due to cold-nuclear matter effects, even without quenching. We demonstrate that the parton distribution uncertainties constitute a significant obstacle in detecting energy loss in small collision systems. Hadron-triggered observables are particularly sensitive to uncertainties due to correlations between the trigger and analyzed particles. For jet-triggered $I_{\mathrm{AA}}$, there exists a kinematic window in which nPDF and scale uncertainties cancel dramatically while showing little sensitivity to parton shower and hadronization models, addressing a major limiting factor for energy loss discovery in small systems.

26 pages, 17 figures; v3: published version

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Observation of suppressed charged-particle production in ultrarelativistic oxygen-oxygen collisions
• Bayesian Constraints on Pre-Equilibrium Jet Quenching and Predictions for Oxygen Collisions
• Selection bias effects on high-$p_{\mathrm{T}}$ yield and correlation measurements in Oxygen+Oxygen collisions
• Flavor and path-length dependence of jet quenching from inclusive jet and γ-jet suppression
• Statistical analysis of pQCD energy loss across system size, flavor, $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$, and $p_T$
• Diffractive vector meson photo-production in oxygen-oxygen and neon-neon ultraperipheral collisions at energies available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider