The Rapidity Dependence of Jet Quenching

Abstract

The suppression of high transverse momentum (P_T) jets and hadrons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions with respect to a p-p baseline in terms of the nuclear suppression factor R_AA is one of the key observables to gauge the density of a hot and dense QCD medium. However, the suppression measured by R_AA is not a straightforward measure of the medium properties, the value of the observable also depends on the ratio of quark to gluon jets and on the slope of the hard parton spectrum, which explains why R_AA is found to be fairly similar at RHIC and LHC despite the very different dynamics. Measuring high P_T jets and hadrons at forward rapidity offers the same possibility of varying medium density, parton mixture and spectral slope without the need to compare across different sqrt(s) and experiments. In this work, the well-tested jet quenching Monte-Carlo (MC) framework YaJEM is utilized to compute the rapidity dependence of R_AA for three test cases.