The dijet mass distribution in heavy ion collisions

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
² Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
³ Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA

^★ e-mail: jdreiten@physics.ucla.edu

Published online: 16 June 2020

Abstract

In these proceedings, we review the production of both light and heavy flavor dijets in heavy ion collisions and highlight a promising observable to expose their distinct signatures. We propose the modification of dijet invariant mass distributions in heavy ion collisions as a new observable that exhibits striking sensitivity to the heavy quark mass dependence of in-medium parton showers. This observable has the advantage of amplifying the effects of jet quenching in contrast to conventional observables, such as the dijet momentum imbalance shift, which involve cancellations of such effects and, hence, result in less pronounced signals. Predictions are presented for Au+Au collisions at √S_NN = 200 GeV to guide the future sPHENIX program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.