Charting QCD jet evolution in extreme conditions

In ultra-relativistic particle collisions, such as those performed at RHIC and LHC, quarks and gluons (partons) can be scattered with large transverse momenta and subsequently evolve into collimated sprays of hadrons known as jets. Jets are the experimental proxies for the hard scattered partons, convoluting both their perturbative and non-perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) evolution. Depending on the collision system, the outgoing partons can either traverse what we actually call a “QCD vacuum”, as in deep inelastic scatterings (DIS) or proton-proton collisions, or a new, highly complex state of matter - the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), produced in heavy-ion collisions (HICs).


This medium evolves concurrently with the hard partons, further convoluting HIC jets with QGP-induced effects.
Our research aims to use jet substructure to disentangle these effects and probe QCD across different environments and energy scales.

We employ substructure-based jet selections in electron-proton DIS to enhance sensitivity to non-perturbative effects, moving towards constraining currently existing phenomenological models to describe hadronization. Furthermore, a detailed characterization of jet quenching, i.e. the modification of jets in the presence of a QGP, has the potential to unlock a comprehensive tomographic description of the QGP. We explore novel jet substructure observables based on energy correlations to quantify jet quenching across angular scales.