Medium modifications of girth distributions for inclusive jets and $Z^0+{\rm jet}$ in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the medium modifications of girth distributions for inclusive jets and $Z^0$ tagged jets with small radius ($R=0.2$) in Pb+Pb collisions with $\sqrt{s}=2.76$ TeV at the LHC. The partonic spectrum in the initial hard scattering of elementary collisions are obtained by a event generator POWHEG+PYTHIA, which matches the next-to-leading (NLO) matrix elements with parton showering, and energy loss of faster parton traversing in hot/dense QCD medium is calculated by Monte Carlo simulation within Higher-Twist formalism of jet quenching in heavy-ion collisions. We present the model calculations of event normalized girth distributions for inclusive jets in p+p and Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}=2.76$ TeV, which give nice descriptions of ALICE measurements. It is shown that the girth distributions of inclusive jets in Pb+Pb are shifted to lower girth region relative to that in p+p. Thus the nuclear modification factor of girth distributions for inclusive jets is larger than unity at small girth region, while smaller than one at large girth region. This behavior results from more soft fragments inside a jet as well as the fraction alteration of gluon/quark initiated jets in heavy-ion collisions. We further predict the girth distributions for $Z^0$ boson tagged jets in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s}=2.76$ TeV, and demonstrate that the medium modification on girth distributions for $Z^0$ tagged jets is less pronounced as compared to that for inclusive jets because the dominant components of $Z^0$ tagged jets are quark-initiated jets.