Comparing STAR and sPHENIX Background Subtraction Routines in Particle Jet Analysis

Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is formed by colliding heavy ions at relativistic speeds. When these collisions occur, the ions' constituent quarks and gluons can hard-scatter off of each other and fragment into particle jets, which lose energy as they travel through the QGP. Several algorithms have been created to pick out particle jets in collision data, and several methods of subtracting the heavy ion background off of this jet data have been proposed and implemented across different experiments. In this research, two such background subtraction routines are applied to a simulated collision dataset, and their results are analyzed and compared by looking at the effect on the scale and resolution of the output jets. Specifically, the two methods employed in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider's STAR experiment and its upcoming sPHENIX experiment are used for comparison.