Jet Quenching Theory: Advancing Towards Precision Phenomenology

Since the discovery of jet quenching at RHIC two decades ago, significant progress has been made in developing novel theoretical tools to describe jet evolution in hot and dense QCD matter, aiming to probe the non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly coupled matter. This progress includes the study of emergent transport phenomena such as turbulent energy loss, anomalous diffusion, and color decoherence. Recently, effective field theory techniques have been applied to the problem of jet quenching, paving the way for precision calculations of jet observables in heavy-ion collisions (HIC). In this talk, I will review these recent developments, with a focus on a new factorization formula for jet production in HIC, which facilitates a robust separation of short-distance perturbative physics from soft non-perturbative physics. Additionally, I will discuss promising jet substructure observables that provide new insights into jet tomography and the characterization of the quark-gluon plasma.