Interplaying mechanisms behind inclusive jet RAA and extraction of jet energy loss distributions

Abstract The observed inclusive jet suppression in heavy-ion collisions at LHC has a very weak p T dependence over a large range of p T = 50 – 1000 GeV and is almost independent of the colliding energy, though the initial energy density of the bulk medium has increased from s = 2.76  to  5.02 TeV by about 20%. This interesting phenomenon is investigated in the linear Boltzmann transport (LBT) model for jet propagation in an event-by-event 3+1D hydro background. We show that the p T dependence of jet R A A is determined by the initial spectrum in p + p collisions and p T dependence of jet energy loss. Furthermore, jet energy loss distributions for inclusive jet and γ-jet at both LHC energies are extracted directly from experimental data through the state-of-art Bayesian analysis. The averaged jet energy loss has a weak p T dependence and the scaled jet energy loss distributions have a large width, both of which are consistent with the LBT simulations and indicate that jet quenching is caused by only a few out-of-cone jet medium scatterings.