Jet Reconstruction in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

Measurements of strong suppression of inclusive hadron distributions and di-hadron correlations at high $p_{T}$, while providing evidence for partonic energy loss, also suffer from geometric biases due to the competition of energy loss and fragmentation. The measurements of fully reconstructed jets is expected to lack these biases as the energy flow is measured independently of the fragmentation details. In this article, we review the recent results from the heavy ion collisions collected by the STAR experiment at RHIC on direct jet reconstruction utilizing the modern sequential recombination and cone jet reconstruction algorithms together with their background subtraction techniques. In order to assess the jet reconstruction biases a comparison with the jet cross section measurement in $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV p+p collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions to account for nuclear geometric effects is performed. Comparison of the inclusive jet cross section obtained in central Au+Au events with that in $p+p$ collisions, published previously by STAR, suggests that unbiased jet reconstruction in the complex heavy ion environment indeed may be possible.