First full jet measurement in Pb-Pb collisions with ALICE

摘要

In high-energy collisions at the LHC, quarks and gluons occasionally scatter violently and produce correlated showers of particles, or "jets". In proton-proton collisions, the rate of such scatters is precisely calculable using perturbative QCD. However, in heavy-ion collisions, jets should be modified, because the scattered quarks and gluons are expected to interact with the surrounding hot nuclear matter, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Jet measurements, together with model calculations of the "jet quenching" phenomenon, therefore provide important information about the properties of the QGP.