Leading order track functions in a hot and dense QGP

Abstract

We study the modifications to the fragmentation pattern of partons into charged particles in the presence of a hot and dense quark gluon plasma. To this end, we analyze the perturbative renormalization group equations of the track functions, which describe the energy fraction carried by charged hadrons. Focusing on pure Yang-Mills theory, we compute the lowest-order moments of the medium-modified track functions, which are found to be sensitive to the reduced phase space for emissions in the medium and to energy loss. We use the extracted moments to calculate the energy energy correlator (EEC) on tracks in the collinear limit. The EEC on medium-evolved tracks does not differ qualitatively from the EEC on vacuum tracks despite being sensitive to the color decoherence transition and suppressing the distribution due to quenching, as seen in other jet observables. Published by the American Physical Society 2024