The Soft Scattering Contribution to Jet Quenching in a Quark-Gluon Plasma and General Properties of Partonic Energy Loss

Abstract

Starting from the observation that soft rescattering of hard scattered partons from the colour charged remnant plays an important role in proton-proton collisions a similar model for soft scatterings in a quark-gluon plasma was constructed and implemented as a Monte Carlo event generator. The main emphasis was put on the question to what extend these soft scatterings can contribute to the energy loss that an energetic parton suffers, when it traverses a quark-gluon plasma. It was found that the soft scattering can account for up to 50% of the observed energy loss. Furthermore, it was investigated what information present data reveal about the general features of partonic energy loss. This study was carried out with a Monte Carlo model that includes the full simulation of the quark-gluon plasma but uses a more general ansatz for the energy loss which makes it possible to emulate different scenarios like coherent gluon bremsstrahlung, scattering etc. Unfortunately, it turned out that it is difficult to differentiate between them so that at present no clear decision in favour of one or the other is possible.