Observation of centrality-dependent dijet transverse momentum imbalance in O+O and Ne+Ne collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.36 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The ATLAS experiment presents an observation of a centrality-dependent dijet transverse momentum imbalance in O+O and Ne+Ne collisions at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 5.36 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider. The measurement uses 8.0 nb$^{-1}$ of O+O and 1.0 nb$^{-1}$ of Ne+Ne data collected in 2025, together with 386 pb$^{-1}$ of \textit{pp} data at the same energy used as a reference. The dijet momentum balance is quantified using the ratio of the sub-leading jet transverse momentum to that of the leading jet, $x_J$. For dijets produced azimuthally back-to-back, the self-normalized $x_J$ distributions exhibit increasingly large deviations from the \textit{pp} reference as collisions become more central, corresponding to an increasing overlap of the colliding nuclei. The observed centrality dependence is consistent with medium-induced partonic energy loss in O+O and Ne+Ne collisions, demonstrating that such effects persist in collision systems considerably smaller than Pb+Pb and Xe+Xe. These results establish a new regime for investigating the path-length dependence of jet quenching and constrain the onset of quark-gluon plasma effects in small nuclear collision systems.