arXiv subjects

Liliana Apolinário

Publications and source records attributed to Liliana Apolinário.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Gluon radiation from a QCD antenna with realistic parton-medium interactions

The spectrum of coherent gluon radiation from a quark-antiquark pair undergoing multiple scatterings within a colored medium is central for understanding in-medium parton cascades. However, current efforts are constrained by reliance on a number of approximations, such as the harmonic oscillator approximation, that are only valid within limited regions of phase space. In this paper, we circumvent this problem by expressing the full in-medium gluon emission spectrum as a set of differential equations that can be solved numerically. This formalism, previously applied to the case of medium-induced radiation off a single color charge, allows to resum medium interactions to all orders while employing realistic scattering models. The resulting angle and energy distributions of emitted gluons serve to illustrate the breakdown of color coherence across the entire accessible phase-space, and constitute a definite step towards a higher-precision description of jet observables.

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arXiv2026

Bottom-up approach to describe groomed jet data in heavy-ion collisions

The theoretical interpretation of jet observables in heavy-ion collisions is a complex task due to the intricate interplay of perturbative and non-perturbative effects. One way to reduce this complexity is to groom away soft, wide-angle radiation so that perturbative dynamics dominates. Even in this simplified scenario, there are competing explanations for the physical origin of the measured medium-induced modifications. In this paper, we present a minimal approach to compute groomed substructure observables. The core idea is to treat medium effects as an effective energy shift of the hard, vacuum-like substructure. This energy shift includes a gradual onset of colour decoherence effects and thus depends on the jet substructure itself. We first study a NLO-exact dijet configuration in vacuum and apply radiative energy-loss to the two subjets. We find that this minimal setup already captures the narrowing trend of groomed observables but it's not able to quantitatively describe the existing data. Next, we match the NLO matrix-element to a leading-logarithm accurate parton shower and perform a clustering algorithm to recover a two-prong system to which we again apply the energy-loss distribution. Despite its simplicity, the model results in a very good theory-to-data agreement (within $10\%$) for a broad range of observables including both ALICE and ATLAS kinematics. We also examine the discriminating power of groomed jet data in terms of colour decoherence effects and find that substructure-dependent energy loss yields an overall better agreement.

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arXiv2025

Jet quenching without energy loss

The onset of jet quenching, i.e. the suppression of high transverse momentum particles and jets, is an important question in the context of understanding the onset of collective behaviour and small collision systems. We investigate a minimal scenario where a hard parton experiences a single soft re-scattering that leaves the kinematics unmodified, but the colour exchange leads to a loss of colour coherence that is observable in the final distribution of fragments. In particular, the formation time of the first splitting as reconstructed at hadron level from jets using the formation time clustering algorithm is sensitive the loss of colour coherence. Moreover, it can distinguish the coherence loss scenario from a corresponding energy loss scenario, since small energy loss effects leave the formation time distribution unchanged.

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arXiv2025

Gluon emission by a $q\bar{q}$ antenna with realistic parton-medium interactions

The spectrum of coherent gluon radiation from a quark-anti-quark pair experiencing multiple scatterings within a coloured medium is central for understanding in-medium parton cascades. Despite its foundational importance, current results are limited by reliance on simplified scattering rates, such as the harmonic oscillator approximation, valid only in restricted phase-space regions. Using the formalism introduced in a previous article, we express the gluon emission spectrum as a set of differential equations that can be solved numerically, circumventing conventional approximations. We present the transverse momentum and energy distributions of emitted gluons for realistic interaction models, illustrating the breakdown of colour coherence across the entire accessible phase-space, and consequently enabling a higher-precision description of jet observables.

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arXiv2025

Assessing Uncertainties in Parton Showers at Double Logarithmic Accuracy for Jet Quenching Studies

This paper assesses the uncertainties inherent to parton shower simulations at double logarithmic accuracy, with a focus on their impact on jet quenching studies in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. For that purpose, we developed a massless quark-initiated vacuum parton shower toy-model with different evolution variables, such as inverse formation time, invariant squared mass, and squared opening angle. In addition to the effects of varying the ordering variable we further examine their corresponding kinematic reconstructions. The results highlight how these variations influence key distributions, including the number of splittings, angular and transverse momentum distribution of subsequent emissions. We also analyse the Lund distributions and their average trajectories, revealing that the choice of ordering variable has a significantly greater impact on the vacuum parton shower evolution than the kinematic scheme, particularly in large-angle emission regions. When a simple jet quenching model based on decoherence is implemented, we observe that the fraction of quenched events is sensitive to the ordering prescription, especially for the first splitting and thin media, highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of the branching process in the presence of an extended QCD media.

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arXiv2025

Flavor dependence of Energy-energy correlators

Energy-energy correlators (EECs) within high energy jets serve as a key experimentally accessible quantity to probe the scale and structure of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The CMS Collaboration's first measurement of the modification to the EEC within single inclusive jets in Pb+Pb collisions relative to p+p collisions reveals a significant enhancement at small angles, which may arise from jet transverse momentum $p_T$ selection biases due to jet energy loss. We investigate the dependence of jet EECs on the flavor of the initiating parton. The EEC distribution of a gluon jet is broader and the peak of transition from perturbative to non-perturbative regime occurs at a larger angle than a quark jet. Such flavor dependence leads to the different EECs for $γ$-jets and single inclusive jets due to their different flavor composition. It is also responsible for a colliding energy dependence of EECs of single inclusive jets at fixed jet energy. We also investigate the impact of flavor composition variation on the $p_T$ dependence of the jet EEC. We further propose that a change in the gluon jet fraction in A+A collisions compared to p+p can also contribute to a non-negligible enhancement of the medium modified EEC at small angles. Using the \textsc{Jewel} model, we predict the reduction of the gluon jet fraction in A+A collisions and estimate its impact on the EEC.

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arXiv2025

Enhancing charge ratio sensitivity to hadronization effects via jet selections on resolved SoftDrop splitting

The study of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at ultra-relativistic energies can be performed in a controlled environment through lepton-hadron deep inelastic scatterings. In such collisions, the high-energy partonic emissions that follow from the ejected hard partons are accurately described by perturbative QCD. However, the lower energy scales at which quarks and gluons experience colour confinement, i.e. hadronization mechanism, fall outside the validity regions for perturbative calculations, requiring phenomenological models tuned to data to describe it. As such, hadronization physics cannot be currently derived from first principles alone. Monte Carlo event generators are useful tools to describe these processes as they simulate both the perturbative and the non-perturbative interactions, with model-dependent energy scales that control parton dynamics. This work employs jets - experimental reconstructions of final-state particles likely to have a common partonic origin - to inspect this transition further. Although originally proposed to circumvent hadronization effects, we show that jets can be utilised as probes of non-perturbative phenomena via their substructure. The charge correlation ratio was recently shown to be sensitive to hadronization effects. Our work further improves this sensitivity to non-perturbative scales by introducing a new selection based on the relative placement of the \textit{resolved SoftDrop splitting} within the clustering tree, defined as the unclustering that resolves the jet's leading charged particles.

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arXiv2024

In-medium gluon radiation spectrum with all-order resummation of multiple scatterings in longitudinally evolving media

Over the past years, there has been a sustained effort to systematically enhance our understanding of medium-induced emissions occurring in the quark-gluon plasma, driven by the ultimate goal of advancing our comprehension of jet quenching phenomena. To ensure meaningful comparisons between these new calculations and experimental data, it becomes crucial to model the interplay between the radiation process and the evolution of the medium parameters, typically described by a hydrodynamical simulation. This step presents particular challenges when dealing with calculations involving the resummation of multiple scatterings, which have been shown to be necessary for achieving an accurate description of the in-medium emission process. In this paper, we extend our numerical calculations of the fully-resummed gluon spectrum to account for longitudinally expanding media. This new implementation allows us to quantitatively assess the accuracy of previously proposed scaling laws that establish a correspondence between an expanding medium and a ``static equivalent''. Additionally, we show that such scaling laws yield significantly improved results when the static reference case is replaced by an expanding medium with the temperature following a simple power-law decay. Such correspondence will enable the application of numerical calculations of medium-induced energy loss in realistic evolving media for a broader range of phenomenological studies.

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arXiv2024

Towards an unbiased jet energy loss measurement

The modifications imprinted on jets due to their interaction with Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) are assessed by comparing samples of jets produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions and proton-proton collisions. The standard procedure ignores the effect of bin migration by comparing specific observables for jet populations at the same reconstructed jet transverse momentum ($p_T$). Since jet $p_T$ is itself modified by interaction with QGP, all such comparisons confound QGP induced modifications with changes that are simply a consequence of comparing jets that started out differently. The quantile matching procedure introduced by Brewer et al. directly estimates average fractional jet energy loss ($Q_{AA}$) and can thus mitigate this $p_T$ migration effect. In this work, we validate the procedure in more realistic scenarios that include medium response. We study the evolution of $Q_{AA}$ with jet radius, its sensitivity to minimum particle $p_T$ and medium response as implemented in two different models for jet evolution in heavy-ion collisions. Further, we use this procedure to establish that the difference between inclusive jet and $γ+$jet nuclear modification factors ($R_{AA}$) is dominated by differences in the spectral shape, leaving the colour charge of the jet initiating parton with a lesser role to play. Additionally, we compare $Q_{AA}$ to an experimentally proposed proxy for fractional jet energy loss, $S_{loss}$, showing that both quantities are similar, although the former provides a more clear physical interpretation. Finally, we show the size of the $p_T$ migration correction for four different substructure observables and how to reliably use the quantile procedure experimentally to improve existing measurements.

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arXiv2024

Exploring the time axis within medium-modified jets

In this manuscript, we illustrate how to use the newly proposed $τ$ re-clustering algorithm to select jets with different degrees of quenching without biasing their initial transverse momentum spectrum. Our study is based on Z+jet simulated events using the JEWEL Monte Carlo event generator to account for jet quenching effects. We apply the $τ$ re-clustering algorithm to extract a proxy for a time axis (formation time) within the evolving medium. This information allows us to label jets according to their fragmentation pattern and select populations with enhanced sensitivity to quenching effects. Our results illustrate the potential of jets as precision tools for QGP tomography. Further, we show that the discussed method minimizes the biases stemming from $p_{T}$-, $dR$- or mass-based jet selection.

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arXiv2024

Parton cascades at DLA: the role of the evolution variable

The theoretical treatment of jet quenching lacks a full description of the interplay between vacuum-like emissions, usually formulated in momentum space, and medium induced ones that demand an interface with a space-time picture of the expanding medium and thus must be formulated in position space. In this work we build a toy Monte-Carlo parton shower ordered in formation time, virtual mass, and opening angle, which are equivalent at leading logarithmic accuracy. Aiming to explore a link with jet substructure, we compute the Lund plane distributions for the different ordering prescriptions. Further, we investigate the sensitivity of ordering prescriptions to medium effects by counting the number of events eliminated by a decoherence condition.

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arXiv2023

Parton cascades at DLA: the role of the evolution variable

While experimental studies on jet quenching have achieved a large sophistication, the theoretical description of this phenomenon still misses some important points. One of them is the interplay of vacuum-like emissions, usually formulated in momentum space, with the medium induced ones that demand an interplay with a space-time picture of the medium and thus must be formulated in position space. A unified description of both vacuum and medium-induced emissions is lacking. In this work, we compute the tree-level probability of a double gluon emission in vacuum, and identify the enhanced phase-space regions for each diagram, corresponding to different configurations of the parton cascade. This calculation provides a parametric form for the formation times associated with each diagram, highlighting the equivalence of various ordering variables at double logarithmic accuracy. This equivalence is further explored by building a toy Monte-Carlo parton shower ordered in formation time, virtuality, transverse momentum, and angle. Aiming at a link with jet substructure, we compute the Lund Plane distributions and trajectories for each ordering prescription. We also compute the distributions in number of splittings and final partons, with the goal of clarifying the differences to be expected from the different ordering variables and the vetoes that must be implemented at Monte Carlo level to conserve energy-momentum, which turn out to have a sizeable influence on the shower's evolution.

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arXiv2023

Medium-induced radiation with vacuum propagation in the pre-hydrodynamics phase

The recent discovery of the potential of jet quenching observables to constrain the initial stages after a heavy-ion collision makes imperative to have a better understanding of the process of medium-induced radiation before the formation of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and its impact on observables at high-$p_T$. In this work, we generalize the BDMPS-Z framework for medium-induced radiation to account for additional emissions occurring before the creation of the QGP. For simplicity, we assume that during the pre-hydrodynamics phase the hard parton propagates as in vacuum. This set-up, allows us to isolate the contribution from the additional initial radiation by comparing with the usual scenarios in which the emitter is created inside the medium but with different starting points. Using both a numerical implementation of the fully resummed emission spectrum and the usual analytical approximations, we find that replacing an initial slab of the medium by vacuum yields to a significant reduction of the emission spectrum for low radiated gluon energies, while the high-energy tails remain largely unmodified. Finally, we assess the effect of replacing the initial medium by vacuum propagation on the single-inclusive particle suppression $R_{AA}$ and high-$p_T$ azimuthal asymmetry $v_2$. Our findings indicate that considering vacuum propagation prior to hydrodynamization leads to an increase in the $v_2$, thus corroborating the importance of the treatment of jet quenching in the initial stages for the correct description of both observables.

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arXiv2022

Heavy quarks and jets as probes of the QGP

Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), a QCD state of matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, has remarkable properties, including, for example, a low shear viscosity over entropy ratio. By detecting the collection of low-momentum particles that arise from the collision, it is possible to gain quantitative insight into the created matter. However, its fast evolution and thermalization properties remain elusive. Only using high momentum objects as probes of QGP can unveil its constituents at different wavelengths. In this review, we attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of what was, so far, possible to infer about QGP given our current theoretical understanding of jets, heavy-flavor, and quarkonia. We will bridge the resulting qualitative picture to the experimental observations done at the LHC and RHIC. We will focus on the phenomenological description of experimental observations, provide a brief analytical summary of the description of hard probes, and an outlook on the main difficulties we will need to surpass in the following years. To benchmark QGP-related effects, we will also address nuclear modifications to the initial state and hadronization effects.

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arXiv2021

Time reclustering for jet quenching studies

The physics program of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) has brought a unique insight into the hot and dense QCD matter created in such collisions, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Jet quenching, a collection of medium-induced modifications of the jets' internal structure that occur through their development in dense QCD matter, has a unique potential to assess the time structure of the produced medium. In this work, we perform an exploratory study to identify jet reclustering tools that can potentiate future QGP tomographic measurements with jets at current energies. Our results show that by using the inverse of formation time to obtain the jet clustering history, one can identify more accurately the time structure of QCD emissions inside jets, even in the presence of jet quenching.

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arXiv2020

Medium-induced gluon radiation with full resummation of multiple scatterings for realistic parton-medium interactions

The new precision era of jet quenching observables at both RHIC and the LHC calls for an improved and more precise description of in-medium gluon emissions. The development of new theoretical tools and analytical calculations to tackle this challenge has been hampered by the inability to include the effects of multiple scatterings with the medium using a realistic model for the parton-medium interactions. In this paper, we show how the analytical expressions for the full in-medium spectrum, including the resummation of all multiple scatterings, can be written in a form where the numerical evaluation can be easily performed without the need of the usually employed harmonic or single hard approximations. We present the transverse momentum and energy-dependent medium-induced gluon emission distributions for known realistic interaction models to illustrate how our framework can be applied beyond the limited kinematic regions of previous calculations.

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arXiv2020

Road map to extracting medium properties: an overview

In this manuscript, it is presented an overview of the Quark-Gluon Plasma properties measured, so far, using hard probes. We will focus on both quantitative and qualitative properties that have been (or are about to be) measured, making a link between the theoretical description and experimental results. Throughout the manuscript, highlights to some of the conferences' results will be given, but without an extensive overview. A personal opinion of the most important developments and critical problems that need more work in the future is presented at the end.

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arXiv2020

On the breaking of Casimir scaling in jet quenching

We study the breaking of Casimir scaling, $C_F/C_A$, due to the evolution of jets in a hot and extended medium. By using JEWEL, a medium modified Monte Carlo event generator validated for a wide set of observables, we are able to study separately the development of quark and gluon-initiated jets produced back-to-back with a $Z-$boson. Focusing on the $p_T$ distribution, we conclude first that the colour charge ratio is constant but larger than Casimir scaling for high $p_T$ jets. In addition, our results seem to indicate that the medium induced cascade is more similar between quarks and gluons, thus driving the overall medium shower scaling away from the vacuum expectation. Finally, we compare our results to another Monte Carlo generator and observe the same scaling violation.

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