Jet fragmentation via azimuthal angular correlations of heavy flavor decay electrons in pp, p--Pb, and Pb--Pb collisions using PYTHIA8+Angantyr

Abstract

Measurements in heavy flavor azimuthal angular correlation provide insight into the production, propagation, and hadronization of heavy flavor jets in ultra-relativistic hadronic and heavy-ion collisions. These measurements across different colliding systems, like p--A and A--A, help us isolate the possible modification in particle production due to cold nuclear matter (CNM) effects and the formation of Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), respectively. Jet correlation studies give direct access to the initial parton dynamics produced in these collisions. This article studies the azimuthal angular correlations of electrons from heavy flavor hadron decays in pp, p--Pb, and Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\rm{NN}} =$ 5.02 TeV using PYTHIA8+Angantyr. We study the production of heavy flavor jets with different parton level processes, including multi-parton interactions, different color reconnection prescriptions, and initial and final state radiation processes. In addition, we add the hadron-level processes, i.e., Bose-Einstein and rescattering effects, to quantify the effect due to these processes. The heavy flavor electron correlations are calculated in the different trigger and associated $p_\rm{T}$ intervals to characterize the impact of hard and soft scattering in the various colliding systems. The yields and the sigmas associated with the near-side (NS) and away-side (AS) correlation peaks are calculated and studied as a function of associated $p_\rm{T}^{assoc}$ for different trigger $p_\rm{T}^{e}$ ranges.