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Observation of a Centrality-Dependent Dijet Asymmetry in Lead-Lead Collisions at [sqrt]sNN=2.76 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Aad, G. et al. (ATLAS Collaboration) "Observation of a Centrality- Dependent Dijet Asymmetry in Lead-Lead Collisions at √sNN=2.76 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC." Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 252303 (2010) [18 pages] © 2010 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration. As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.252303 Publisher American Physical Society Version Final published version Citable link http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62796 Terms of Use Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. Selected for a Viewpoint in Physics week ending PRL 105, 252303 (2010) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 17 DECEMBER 2010 Observation of a Centrality-Dependent Dijet Asymmetry in Lead-Lead pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi Collisions at sNN ¼ 2:76 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC G. Aad et al.* (ATLAS Collaboration) (Received 25 November 2010; published 13 December 2010) By using the ATLAS detector, observations have been made of a centrality-dependent dijet asymmetry in the collisions of lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider. In a sample of lead-lead events with a per- nucleon center of mass energy of 2.76 TeV, selected with a minimum bias trigger, jets are reconstructed in fine-grained, longitudinally segmented electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters. The transverse ener- gies of dijets in opposite hemispheres are observed to become systematically more unbalanced with increasing event centrality leading to a large number of events which contain highly asymmetric dijets. This is the first observation of an enhancement of events with such large dijet asymmetries, not observed in proton-proton collisions, which may point to an interpretation in terms of strong jet energy loss in a hot, dense medium. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.252303 PACS numbers: 25.75.Bh Collisions of heavy ions at ultrarelativistic energies are The LHC heavy ion program was foreseen to provide an expected to produce an evanescent hot, dense state, with opportunity to study jet quenching at much higher jet temperatures exceeding 2 Â 1012 K, in which the relevant energies than achieved at the Relativistic Heavy Ion degrees of freedom are not hadrons but quarks and gluons. Collider. This Letter provides the firstp measurementsffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi of In this medium, high-energy quarks and gluons are ex- jet production in lead-lead collisions at sNN ¼ 2:76 TeV pected to transfer energy to the medium by multiple inter- per nucleon-nucleon collision, the highest center of mass actions with the ambient plasma. There is a rich theoretical energy ever achieved for nuclear collisions. At this energy, literature on in-medium QCD energy loss extending back next-to-leading-order QCD calculations [6] predict abun- to Bjorken, who proposed to look for ‘‘jet quenching’’ in dant rates of jets above 100 GeV produced in the pseudor- proton-proton collisions [1]. This work also suggested the apidity region jj < 4:5 [7], which can be reconstructed by observation of highly unbalanced dijets when one jet is ATLAS. produced at the periphery of the collision. For comprehen- The data in this Letter were obtained by ATLAS during sive reviews of recent theoretical work in this area, see the 2010 lead-lead run at the LHC and correspond to an Refs. [2,3]. integrated luminosity of approximately 1:7 bÀ1. Single particle measurements made by Relativistic For this study, the focus is on the balance between the Heavy Ion Collider experiments established that high highest transverse energy pair of jets in events where transverse momentum (pT) hadrons are produced at rates those jets have an azimuthal angle separation Á ¼j1 À a factor of 5 or more lower than expected by assuming 2j >=2 to reduce contributions from multijet final QCD factorization holds in every binary collision of nu- states. In this Letter, jets with Á>=2 are labeled as cleons in the oncoming nuclei [4,5]. This observation is being in opposite hemispheres. The jet energy imbalance is characterized by measurements of RAA, the ratio of yields expressed in terms of the asymmetry AJ: in heavy ion collisions to proton-proton collisions, divided by the number of binary collisions. Dihadron measure- ET1 À ET2 AJ ¼ ; Á> ; (1) ments also showed a clear absence of back-to-back hadron ET1 þ ET2 2 production in more central heavy ion collisions [5], strongly suggestive of jet suppression. The limited rapidity where the first jet is required to have a transverse energy coverage of the experiment, and jet energies comparable to ET1 > 100 GeV, and the second jet is the highest trans- the underlying event energy, prevented a stronger conclu- verse energy jet in the opposite hemisphere with ET2 > sion being drawn from these data. 25 GeV. The average contribution of the underlying event energy is subtracted when deriving the individual jet trans- verse energies. The event selection is chosen such that the *Full author list given at the end of the article. first jet has high reconstruction efficiency and the second jet is above the distribution of background fluctuations and Published by The American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distri- the intrinsic soft jets associated with the collision. Dijet bution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and events are expected to have AJ near zero, with deviations the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. expected from gluon radiation falling outside the jet cone, 0031-9007=10=105(25)=252303(18) 252303-1 Ó 2010 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration week ending PRL 105, 252303 (2010) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 17 DECEMBER 2010 as well as from instrumental effects. Energy loss in the covering the full azimuth between 2:09 < jj < 3:84 and medium could lead to much stronger deviations in the divided into eight sectors and two sectors. reconstructed energy balance. Coincidences in the zero degree calorimeter and luminos- The ATLAS detector [8] is well-suited for measuring ity measurement using a Cherenkov integrating detector jets due to its large acceptance, highly segmented electro- were also used as primary triggers, since these detectors magnetic and hadronic calorimeters. These allow efficient were far less susceptible to LHC beam backgrounds. These reconstruction of jets over a wide range in the region triggers have a large overlap and are close to fully efficient jj < 4:5. The detector also provides precise charged par- for the events studied here. ticle and muon tracking. An event display showing the inner In the offline analysis, events are required to have a time detector and calorimeter systems is shown in Fig. 1. difference between the two sets of minimum bias trigger Liquid argon technology providing excellent energy and scintillator counters of Át<3nsand a reconstructed ver- position resolution is used in the electromagnetic calorime- tex to efficiently reject beam-halo backgrounds. The pri- ter that covers the pseudorapidity range jj < 3:2. The mary vertex is derived from the reconstructed tracks in the hadronic calorimetry in the range jj < 1:7 is provided inner detector, which covers jj < 2:5 by using silicon by a sampling calorimeter made of steel and scintillating pixel and strip detectors surrounded by straw tubes. tiles. In the end caps (1:5 < jj < 3:2), liquid argon tech- These event selection criteria have been estimated to ac- nology is also used for the hadronic calorimeters, matching cept over 98% of the total lead-lead inelastic cross section. the outer jj limits of the electromagnetic calorimeters. To The level of event activity or ‘‘centrality’’ is character- complete the coverage, the liquid argon forward calo- ized by using the total transverse energy (ÆET) deposited rimeters provide both electromagnetic and hadronic energy in the forward calorimeters (FCal), which cover 3:2 < measurements, extending the coverage up to jj¼4:9. jj < 4:9, shown in Fig. 2. Bins are defined in centrality The calorimeter ( and ) granularities are 0:1 Â 0:1 for according to fractions of the total lead-lead cross section the hadronic calorimeters up to jj¼2:5 (except for the selected by the trigger and are expressed in terms third layer of the tile calorimeter, which has a segmentation of percentiles (0%–10%, 10%–20%, 20%–40%, and of 0:2 Â 0:1 up to jj¼1:7) and then 0:2 Â 0:2 up to 40%–100%) with 0% representing the upper end of the jj¼4:9. The electromagnetic calorimeters are longitudi- ÆET distribution. Previous heavy ion experiments have nally segmented into three compartments and feature a shown a clear correlation of the ÆET with the geometry much finer readout granularity varying by layer, with cells of the overlap region of the colliding nuclei and, corre- as small as 0:025 Â 0:025 extending to jj¼2:5 in the spondingly, the total event multiplicity. This is verified in middle layer. In the data-taking period considered, ap- the bottom panel of Fig. 2, which shows a tight correlation proximately 187 000 calorimeter cells (98% of the total) between the energy flow near midrapidity and the forward were usable for event reconstruction. ÆET. The forward ÆET is used for this analysis to avoid The bulk of the data reported here were triggered by biasing the centrality measurement with jets. using coincidence signals from two sets of minimum bias Jets have been reconstructed by using the infrared-safe trigger scintillator detectors, positioned at z ¼3:56 m, anti-kt jet clustering algorithm [9] with the radius parame- FIG.