Probing the Quark Gluon Plasma with High-Energy Jets

The Quark–Gluon Plasma (QGP) is an extremely hot and dense state of matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, such as those produced at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in which quarks and gluons are deconfined. High-energy jets—collimated showers of particles originating from hard scatterings—lose energy as they traverse the QGP medium, resulting in jet quenching relative to proton-proton collisions, quantified by the nuclear modification factor R_AA​. Because the initial geometry of heavy-ion collisions is anisotropic, jet energy loss depends on the path length traversed through the medium and the jet’s azimuthal angle with respect to the event plane, characterized by the jet v₂​. This poster reviews jet quenching, previous measurements of the jet R_AA and v₂ at the LHC, and prospects for such measurements at new detectors such as the sPHENIX detector at RHIC.