An EFT approach to Color decoherence in jet quenching

Abstract

We use the EFT developed in \cite{Mehtar-Tani:2025xxd}, to understand the interference driven phenomenon of color decoherence in inclusive jet production in a dense nuclear medium such as Nuclei or Quark Gluon Plasma. Using the factorization formula in \cite{Mehtar-Tani:2024smp,Mehtar-Tani:2025xxd}, expressed as a series of multi-sub-jet operators, we define and calculate the contribution of the two sub-jet effective operator. This explicitly reveals the emergent angular scale $\theta_c$ that controls color decoherence as well an intricate renormalization group structure for the factorized functions. We show that for a jet of radius R in a medium of size L characterized by a jet quenching parameter $\hat q$, both the LPM effect and color decoherence are controlled by a single dimensionless parameter $\sqrt{\hat q L}LR$ and therefore are equally important for phenomenology. This paper shows how interference driven emergent effects can be included in a factorized framework for computing jet observables in heavy ion collisions.