Understanding perturbative and non-perturbative contributions to jets at RHIC

Abstract

Jets, as collections of multi-scale objects, allow for insight into perturbative (high-momentum) processes, but gaining an understanding of the non-perturbative structure within jets such as hadronization effects and the underlying event has been more difficult. In observables sensitive to these non-perturbative effects, a large discrepancy is observed between partonic calculations and experimental data at RHIC. Grooming techniques such as SoftDrop reduce the impact of these non-perturbative effects and isolate the hard radiation associated with the hard scattering for more direct comparison to perturbative calculations. By analogy, CollinearDrop can be used to isolate non-perturbative contributions from a different region of the emission phase space, or the Lund plane, although no measurement of a CollinearDrop observable has yet been published. In these proceedings, we review recent progress on experimentally accessing the perturbative and non-perturbative contributions to jets and their substructure, and discuss potential future measurements at RHIC as a road map toward precision QCD at the EIC.