2016 Theses Doctoral

Perturbative and Nonperturbative Aspects of Jet Quenching in Near-Critical Quark-Gluon Plasmas

Xu, Jiechen

In this thesis, we construct two QCD based energy loss models to perform quantitative analysis of jet quenching observables in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and the LHC.
We first build up a perturbative QCD based CUJET2.0 jet flavor tomography model that couples the dynamical running coupling DGLV opacity series to bulk data constrained relativistic viscous hydrodynamic backgrounds. It solves the strong heavy quark energy loss puzzle at RHIC and explains the surprising transparency of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at the LHC. The observed azimuthal anisotropy of hard leading hadrons requires a path dependent jet-medium coupling in CUJET2.0 that implies physics of nonperturbative origin.
To explore the nonperturbative chromo-electric and chromo-magnetic structure of the strongly-coupled QGP through jet probes, we build up a new CUJET3.0 framework that includes in CUJET2.0 both Polyakov loop suppressed semi-QGP chromo-electric charges and emergent chromo-magnetic monopoles in the critical transition regime. CUJET3.0 quantitatively describes the anisotropic hadron suppression at RHIC and the LHC. More significantly, it provides a robust connection between the long wavelength "perfect fluidity'' of the QGP and the short distance jet transport in the QGP. This framework paves the way for ``measuring'' both perturbative and nonperturbative properties of the QGP, and more importantly for probing color confinement through jet quenching.