Pushing forward jet substructure measurements in heavy-ion collisions
Daniel Pablos, Alba Soto-Ontoso
Abstract
Energetic jets that traverse the quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions serve as excellent probes to study this new state of deconfined QCD matter. Presently, however, our ability to achieve a crisp theoretical interpretation of the crescent number of jet observables measured in experiments is hampered by the presence of selection biases. The aim of this work is to minimize those selection biases associated to the modification of the quark- versus gluon-initiated jet fraction in order to assess the presence of other medium-induced effects, namely, color decoherence, by exploring the rapidity dependence of jet substructure observables. So far, all jet substructure measurements at midrapidity have shown that heavy-ion jets are narrower than vacuum jets. We show both analytically and with Monte Carlo simulations that if the narrowing effect persists at forward rapidities, where the quark-initiated jet fraction is greatly increased, this could serve as an unambiguous experimental observation of color decoherence dynamics in heavy-ion collisions.