Jet radiation in a longitudinally expanding medium

Abstract

Abstract In a series of previous papers, we have presented a new approach, based on perturbative QCD, for the evolution of a jet in a dense quark-gluon plasma. In the original formulation, the plasma was assumed to be homogeneous and static. In this work, we extend our description and its Monte Carlo implementation to a plasma obeying Bjorken longitudinal expansion. Our key observation is that the factorisation between vacuum-like and medium-induced emissions, derived in the static case, still holds for an expanding medium, albeit with modified rates for medium-induced emissions and transverse momentum broadening, and with a modified phase-space for vacuum-like emissions. We highlight a scaling relation valid for the energy spectrum of medium-induced emissions, through which the case of an expanding medium is mapped onto an effective static medium. We find that scaling violations due to vacuum-like emissions and transverse momentum broadening are numerically small. Our new predictions for the nuclear modification factor for jets RAA, the in-medium fragmentation functions, and substructure distributions are very similar to our previous estimates for a static medium, maintaining the overall good qualitative agreement with existing LHC measurements. In the case of RAA, we find that the agreement with the data is significantly improved at large transverse momenta pT ≳ 500 GeV after including the effects of the nuclear parton distribution functions.