Inverting the mass hierarchy of jet quenching effects with prompt $b$-jet substructure

Abstract

In these proceedings, we discuss the role of heavy quark mass on the formation of parton showers. Mass effects are not well understood when parton branching occurs in nuclear matter, such as the quark-gluon plasma. Recently, a theoretically consistent picture of open heavy flavor production in ultra relativistic nuclear collisions has begun to emerge based on effective theories of QCD, such as soft collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons. We show that implementation of in-medium splitting processes containing heavy quarks into next-to-leading order calculations of heavy flavor production leads to larger cross section suppression when compared to traditional energy loss phenomenology. To better constrain the important mass dependence of in-medium splitting functions, we propose a new measurement in relativistic heavy ion collisions, based on a two-prong structure inside a reconstructed heavy flavor jet. In the region of jet transverse momenta where parton mass effects are leading, we predict a unique reversal of the mass hierarchy of jet quenching effects in heavy ion relative to proton collisions. We find that the momentum sharing distribution of prompt $b$-tagged jets is more strongly modified in comparison to the one for light jets. The work summarized here opens new directions of research on the substructure of heavy flavor jets.