Probabilistic picture for medium-induced jet evolution

Abstract

A high energy jet that propagates in a dense medium generates a cascade of partons that can be described as a classical branching process. A simple generating functional for the probabilities to observe a given number of gluons at a given time is derived. This is used to obtain an evolution equation for the inclusive one-gluon distribution, that takes into account the dependence upon the energy and the transverse momentum of the observed gluon. A study of the explicit transverse momentum dependence of the splitting kernel leads us to identify large corrections to the jet quenching parameter.