Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · hep-ph/0406319

The Fragility of High-pT Hadron Spectra as a Hard Probe

K. J. Eskola·H. Honkanen·C. A. Salgado·U. A. Wiedemann
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We study the suppression of high-pT hadron spectra in nuclear collisions, supplementing the perturbative QCD factorized formalism with radiative parton energy loss. We find that the nuclear modification factor which quantifies the degree of suppression, is almost pT-independent both for RHIC (in agreement with data) and for the LHC. This is a consequence of the shape of the partonic pT-spectrum in elementary collisions which implies that for the same value of the nuclear modification factor at higher pT, an increasingly smaller fraction of parton energy loss is needed. When the values of the time-averaged transport coefficient exceed 5 GeV^2/fm, the nuclear modification factor gradually loses its sensitivity to the corresponding produced energy density. This is due to particle production in the outer corona of the medium, which remains almost unsuppressed even for extreme densities. Thus, even for the highest experimentally accessible transverse momentum at the LHC and in contrast to jets, the measurement of leading partons via leading hadrons is not a penetrating probe of the dense matter, but a rather fragile probe which fragments for the opacities reached below the skin of the medium. Relating the transport coefficient to the energy density produced in the collision region, we find and discuss a phenomenon reminiscent of the opacity problem of elliptic flow: namely, the interaction of the hard parent parton with the medium appears to be much stronger than that expected for perturbative interactions of the hard parton with an ideal quark gluon plasma.

Explore related subjects

hep-ph

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

K. J. Eskola, H. Honkanen, C. A. Salgado, U. A. Wiedemann. 2004-06-29. The Fragility of High-pT Hadron Spectra as a Hard Probe. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2004.09.070

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Higgs-Portal Stueckelberg Dark Matter

We study dark photon dark matter X associated with a dark $U(1)_X$ gauge symmetry. To evade laboratory and cosmological constraints on kinetic mixing with the Standard Model $U(1)_Y$, we assign a $Z_2$-odd dark parity to X that forbids such mixing. The leading interactions then arise from gauge-invariant dimension-6 Higgs-portal operators, including both parity-even and parity-odd terms. We assume that the dark matter mass is generated via the Stueckelberg mechanism. In the interacting Stueckelberg EFT, a gauge-invariant dimension-6 parent reduces in unitary gauge to the nominal dimension-4 Higgs-portal interaction $(H^†H)X_μX^μ$, with its coefficient correlated with $m_X^2/Λ^2$, while additional derivative operators are organized by the same longitudinal-mode power counting. We investigate freeze-in production of X from Higgs-pair annihilations after reheating, incorporating both field-strength and Stueckelberg-allowed operators. First, we consider the case in which the Wilson coefficients of the gauge-invariant dimension-6 operators, C and $\tilde C$, are of order unity. Under a conservative single-cutoff power counting in which the strong-coupling scales of the longitudinal mode lie above the cutoff of the field-strength effective theory, we find that the Stueckelberg contributions remain subdominant in dark matter production. We emphasize that this ordering of scales is an explicit assumption rather than a universal consequence of perturbative unitarity. Next, we explore a more general situation in which C and $\tilde C$ are smaller than unity. In this second case, Stueckelberg-allowed operators can become comparable and generate contributions proportional to $T_{reh}^3$, $T_{reh}^5$, and $T_{reh}^7$, including sign-dependent interference effects. For both cases, we show that there exists a wide parameter space consistent with the observed dark matter relic density.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

Scaling laws for amplitude surrogates

Scaling laws describing the dependence of neural network performance on the amount of training data, the spent compute, and the network size have emerged across a huge variety of machine learning task and datasets. In this work, we systematically investigate these scaling laws in the context of amplitude surrogates for particle physics. We show that the scaling coefficients are connected to the number of external particles of the process. Our results demonstrate that scaling laws are a useful tool to achieve desired precision targets.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2026

Analysis of the $D_0^*(2300)$ resonance from lattice QCD under chiral symmetry

We reanalyze the lattice spectra for $I=1/2$ $Dπ$ scattering in the $A_1^+$ irreducible representation from [Phys. Rev. D 111, 014503 (2025)] to investigate the impact of chiral and SU(3) flavor symmetries in $S$-wave $Dπ$ scattering and the $D_0^*(2300)$ resonance. By fitting the phase shifts obtained via Lüscher's formula with both traditional and chirally modified effective-range expansion and $K$-matrix parameterizations, we find that the chiral factor shifts the extracted pole mass closer to the threshold (especially for resonances) and substantially reduces the resonance width. These findings are confirmed by unitarized chiral perturbation theory through a direct fit to the lattice spectra with both the single-channel and the $Dπ$-$Dη$-$D_s\bar{K}$ coupled-channel schemes. Once the coupled channels are incorporated, the two-pole structure of the $D_0^*(2300)$ emerges. The trajectories of the two poles are investigated by varying the pion mass.

hep-ph↗