Azimuthal anisotropies of high-pT particles produced in heavy-ion collisions are understood as an effect of a geometrical selection bias. Particles oriented in the direction in which the QCD medium formed in these collisions is shorter suffer less energy loss, and thus, are over-represented in the final ensemble compared to those oriented in the direction in which the medium is longer. In this work we present the first semianalytical predictions, including propagation through a realistic, hydrodynamical background, of the elliptic azimuthal anisotropy for jets, obtaining a quantitative agreement with available experimental data as a function of the jet pT, its cone size R, and the collisions centrality. Jets are multipartonic, extended objects and their energy loss is sensitive to substructure fluctuations. This sensitivity is determined by the physics of color coherence that relates to the ability of the medium to resolve those partonic fluctuations. Specifically, color dipoles with an angular separation smaller than a critical angle, θc, are not resolved by the medium and they effectively act as a coherent source of energy loss. We find that elliptic jet azimuthal anisotropy has a specially strong dependence on coherence physics due to the marked length dependence of θc. By combining our predictions for the collision systems and center-of-mass energies studied at RHIC and the LHC, covering a wide range of typical values of θc, we show that the relative size of elliptic jet azimuthal anisotropies for jets with different cone sizes R follows a universal trend that indicates a transition from a coherent regime of jet quenching to a decoherent regime. These results suggest a way forward to reveal the role played by the physics of jet color decoherence in probing deconfined QCD matter.
Published by the American Physical Society
2024
