Jet charge in high energy nuclear collisions

Abstract

Averaged jet charge characterizes the electric charge for the initiating parton, and provides a powerfull tool to distinguish quark jets from gluon jets. In this paper, we give the first prediction for the medium modification of averaged jet charge in heavy-ion collision at the LHC, where jet productions in p+p collisions are simulated by PYTHIA6, and parton energy loss in QGP are calculated with two Monte Carlo models of jet quenching: PYQUEN and JEWEL. We found that the distribution of averaged jet charge is significantly suppressed by initial state isospin effects due to the participants of neutrons with zero electric charge during nuclear collisions. Considerable enhancement of averaged jet charge in central Pb+Pb collisions relative to peripheral collisions is observed, since jet quenching effect is more pronounced in central collisions. Distinct feature of averaged jet charge between quark and gluon jets, together with the sensitivity of medium modifications on jet charge to flavor dependence of parton energy loss, could be very useful to discriminate the energy loss pattern between quark and gluon jets in heavy-ion collisions.