Radial profile of bottom quarks in jets in high-energy nuclear collisions *

Abstract

Abstract Angular correlations between a heavy quark (HQ) and its tagged jet are potentially new tools to gain insight into the in-medium partonic interactions in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In this work, we present the first theoretical study on the radial profiles of B mesons in jets in Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The initial production of a bottom quark tagged jet in p+p is computed by SHERPA, which matches the next-to-leading order matrix elements with contributions of parton showers, whereas the massive quark traversing the quark-gluon plasma is described by a Monte Carlo model, SHELL, which can simultaneously simulate light and heavy flavor in-medium energy loss within the framework of Langevin evolution. In p+p collisions, we find that at lower the radial profiles of heavy flavors in jets are sensitive to the heavy quark mass. In 0-10% Pb+Pb collisions at TeV, we observe an inverse modification pattern of the B meson radial profiles in jets at GeV compared to those of D mesons: the jet quenching effects narrow the jet radial profiles of B mesons in jets while broadening those of D mesons in jets. We find that in A+A collisions, the contribution dissipated from the higher GeV region naturally has a narrower initial distribution and consequently leads to a narrower modification pattern of the radial profile; however the diffusion nature of the heavy flavor in-medium interactions will give rise to a broader modification pattern of the radial profile. These two effects consequently compete and offset with each other, and the b quarks in jets benefit more from the former and suffer less diffusion effect compared to that of c quarks in jets. These findings can be tested in the future experimental measurements at the LHC to gain better understanding of the mass effect of jet quenching.