Search for Quasiparticle Scattering in the Quark-Gluon Plasma with Jet Splittings in pp and Pb-Pb Collisions at sNN =5.02 TeV

The ALICE Collaboration reports measurements of the large relative transverse momentum (kT) component of jet substructure in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair sNN=5.02 TeV. Enhancement in the yield of such large-kT emissions in head-on Pb-Pb collisions is predicted to arise from partonic scattering with quasiparticles of the quark-gluon plasma. The analysis utilizes charged-particle jets reconstructed by the anti-kT algorithm with resolution parameter R=0.2 in the transverse-momentum interval 60<pT,ch,jet<80 GeV/c. The soft drop and dynamical grooming algorithms are used to identify high transverse momentum splittings in the jet shower. Comparison of measurements in Pb-Pb and pp collisions shows medium-induced narrowing, corresponding to yield suppression of high-kT splittings, in contrast to the expectation of yield enhancement due to quasiparticle scattering. The measurements are compared to theoretical model calculations incorporating jet modification due to jet-medium interactions ("jet quenching"), both with and without quasiparticle scattering effects. These measurements provide new insight into the underlying mechanisms and theoretical modeling of jet quenching.