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Tywoniuk, Konrad

Publications and source records attributed to Tywoniuk, Konrad.

Predictions for the sPHENIX physics program

sPHENIX is a next-generation detector experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, designed for a broad set of jet and heavy-flavor probes of the Quark-Gluon Plasma created in heavy ion collisions. In anticipation of the commissioning and first data-taking of the detector in 2023, a RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC) workshop was organized to collect theoretical input and identify compelling aspects of the physics program. Here this paper compiles theoretical predictions from the workshop participants for jet quenching, heavy flavor and quarkonia, cold QCD, and bulk physics measurements at sPHENIX.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Medium-induced radiative kernel with the Improved Opacity Expansion

We calculate the fully differential medium-induced radiative spectrum at next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy within the Improved Opacity Expansion (IOE) framework. This scheme allows us to gain analytical control of the radiative spectrum at low and high gluon frequencies simultaneously. The high frequency regime can be obtained in the standard opacity expansion framework in which the resulting power series diverges at the characteristic frequency ω c ~ q^L 2 . In the IOE, all orders in opacity are resumed systematically below ωc yielding an asymptotic series controlled by logarithmically suppressed remainders down to the thermal scale T « ω c , while matching the opacity expansion at high frequency. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the IOE at NLO accuracy reproduces the characteristic Coulomb tail of the single hard scattering contribution as well as the Gaussian distribution resulting from multiple soft momentum exchanges. Finally, we compare our analytic scheme with a recent numerical solution, that includes a full resummation of multiple scatterings, for LHC-inspired medium parameters. Furthermore, we find a very good agreement both at low and high frequencies showcasing the performance of the IOE which provides for the first time accurate analytic formulas for radiative energy loss in the relevant perturbative kinematic regimes for dense media.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Improved opacity expansion for medium-induced parton splitting

We present a new expansion scheme to compute the rate for parton splittings in dense and finite QCD media. In contrast to the standard opacity expansion, our expansion is performed around the harmonic oscillator whose characteristic frequency depends on the typical transverse momentum scale generated in the splitting. The first two orders account for the high frequency regime that is dominated by single hard scatterings together with the regime of multiple soft scatterings at low frequency. This work generalizes the findings of Ref. [1] beyond the leading logarithmic approximation allowing to account also for the Bethe-Heitler regime and compare to the full numerical results from [2]. We investigate the sensitivity of our results to varying the separation scale that defines the leading order. Finally, the application to Monte Carlo event generators is discussed.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Probing jet decoherence in heavy ion collisions

We suggest to use the SofDrop jet grooming technique to investigate the sensitivity of jet substructure to color decoherence in heavy ion collisions. We propose in particular to analyze the two-prong probability angular distribution as a probe of the transition between the coherent and incoherent energy loss regimes. Also, we predict an increasing suppression of two-prong substructures with angle as the medium resolves more jet substructure.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Groomed jets in heavy-ion collisions: sensitivity to medium-induced bremsstrahlung

Here, we argue that contemporary jet substructure techniques might facilitate a more direct measurement of hard medium-induced gluon bremsstrahlung in heavy-ion collisions, and focus specifically on the “soft drop declustering” procedure that singles out the two leading jet substructures. Assuming coherent jet energy loss, we find an enhancement of the distribution of the energy fractions shared by the two substructures at small subjet energy caused by hard medium-induced gluon radiation. Departures from this approximation are discussed, in particular, the effects of colour decoherence and the contamination of the grooming procedure by soft background. Finally, we propose a complementary observable, that is the ratio of the two-pronged probability in Pb-Pb to proton-proton collisions and discuss its sensitivity to various energy loss mechanisms.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Dissipative axial inflation

We analyze in detail the background cosmological evolution of a scalar field coupled to a massless abelian gauge field through an axial term φ/ f {sub γ} F ∼ F , such as in the case of an axion. Gauge fields in this case are known to experience tachyonic growth and therefore can backreact on the background as an effective dissipation into radiation energy density ρ{sub R}, which can lead to inflation without the need of a flat potential. We analyze the system, for momenta k smaller than the cutoff f {sub γ}, including the backreaction numerically. We consider the evolution from a given static initial condition and explicitly show that, if f {sub γ} is smaller than the field excursion φ{sub 0} by about a factor of at least O (20), there is a friction effect which turns on before the field can fall down and which can then lead to a very long stage of inflation with a generic potential. In addition we find superimposed oscillations, which would get imprinted on any kind of perturbations, scalars and tensors. Such oscillations have a period of 4–5 efolds and an amplitude which is typically less than a few percent and decreases linearly with f {sub γ}. We also stress that the curvature perturbation on uniform density slices should be sensitive to slow-roll parameters related to ρ{sub R} rather than φ-dot {sup 2}/2 and we discuss the existence of friction terms acting on the perturbations, although we postpone a calculation of the power spectrum and of non-gaussianity to future work and we simply define and compute suitable slow roll parameters. Finally we stress that this scenario may be realized in the axion case, if the coupling 1/ f {sub γ} to U(1) (photons) is much larger than the coupling 1/ f {sub G} to non-abelian gauge fields (gluons), since the latter sets the range of the potential and therefore the maximal allowed φ{sub 0∼} f {sub G}.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Antiangular Ordering of Gluon Radiation in QCD Media

We investigate angular and energy distributions of medium-induced gluon emission off a quark-antiquark antenna in the framework of perturbative QCD as an attempt toward understanding, from first principles, jet evolution inside the quark-gluon plasma. In-medium color coherence between emitters, neglected in all previous calculations, leads to a novel mechanism of soft-gluon radiation. The structure of the corresponding spectrum, in contrast with known medium-induced radiation, i.e., off a single emitter, retains some properties of the vacuum case; in particular, it exhibits a soft divergence. However, as opposed to the vacuum, the collinear singularity is regulated by the pair opening angle, leading to a strict angular separation between vacuum and medium-induced radiation, denoted as antiangular ordering. We comment on the possible consequences of this new contribution for jet observables in heavy-ion collisions.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗