Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Physics
First Advisor
Caines, Helen
Abstract
Jet quenching is one of the main signals used to investigate the properties of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Besides energy loss, jet quenching can also manifest itself in the modification of jet substructure. This thesis focuses on using STAR data to measure the substructure observable zg, a result of SoftDrop grooming, which probes the physics of the first hard splitting of a hard-scattered parton. As opposed to previous measurements, this thesis explores employing a semi-inclusive approach to measure zg, selecting candi- date jets found within the recoil region of a high transverse momentum trigger particle. Requiring a high transverse momentum trigger object is expected to induce a surface bias on the event selection, potentially causing selected candidate jets in the recoil region to be biased towards having a longer path length within the medium. Consequently, these jets are expected to be more quenched and thus are good candidates to probe for modification of zg at RHIC energies. Combinatorial jet contribution, arising from the large fluctuat- ing background in heavy-ion collisions, is subtracted at the ensemble level, as opposed to employing jet-by-jet discrimination, in order to avoid imposing biases on the selected jet sample.
Recommended Citation
Nemes, Daniel B., "Semi-Inclusive Measurement of the Shared Groomed Momentum Fraction of Jets in Au+Au Collisions at STAR" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1245.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1245
