Jet charge in high-energy nuclear collisions *

Abstract

Abstract The averaged jet charge characterizes the electric charge of the initiating parton and provides a powerful tool to distinguish quark jets from gluon jets. We predict, for the first time, the medium modification of the averaged jet charge in the heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, where jet productions in p+p collisions are simulated by PYTHIA6, and the parton energy loss in QGP is calculated with two Monte Carlo models of jet quenching: PYQUEN and JEWEL. We found that the distribution of averaged jet charge is significantly suppressed by initial state isospin effects due to the participation of neutrons with zero electric charge during nuclear collisions. The considerable enhancement of the averaged jet charge in central Pb+Pb collisions is observed relative to peripheral collisions, since the jet quenching effect is more pronounced in central collisions. The distinct feature of the averaged jet charge between quark and gluon jets, along with the sensitivity of medium modifications on the jet charge to flavor dependence of the parton energy loss, could be very useful to discriminate the energy loss pattern between quark and gluon jets in heavy-ion collisions.