Leading order, next-to-leading order, and non-perturbative parton collision kernels: Effects on the jet substructure

¹ Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2T8
² Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
³ State Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

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Published online: 5 November 2025

Abstract

As an important signature of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a highprecision energy-loss model is essential to independently verify the QGP properties extracted from soft particles. In this work, we optimize the energy loss modeling in MARTINI by introducing the formation time of the parton shower in the initial hard scattering, which is essential for a simultaneous description of the hadron and jet R_AA. Based on this, we study the phenomenological influence of the higher order collision kernels—the up-to-NLO one evaluated by EQCD and the non-perturbative (NP) one computed in lattice QCD — on the energy loss of the hard parton, compared to the LO kernel. The hadron and jet R_AA are calculated with AMY rates using the three kernels and the optimized parameter sets for the running coupling. The results exhibit remarkable similarities in their overall values as well as in p_T and centrality dependence. Sizable differences in the jet substructure are observed between different soft radiation rates.