Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Jets: a useful tool to study nuclear media

Gojko Vujanovic

University of Regina

The production of very energetic quarks and gluons (i.e., partons) and their showering in the Quantum Chromodynamical (QCD) vacuum has been well studied inside relativistic electron-positron, electron-proton and proton-(anti)proton collisions. Perturbative QCD has provided a good description of high energy partons in those collisions, and thus we consider them as calibrated probes inside nuclear collisions including relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In nuclear collisions, parton showering is used to study the finite density nuclear medium known as the quark gluon plasma (QGP). I will present a modern understanding of parton interaction with the nuclear medium, along with simulations used to describe them. Finally, I will present recent constraints on an important transport coefficient describing how partons behave inside the QGP, as well as some prospects for future improvement.