Hard gluon evolution in the last stage of the bottom-up thermalization

The study of how fast thermalization in heavy ion collisions occurs has been one of the central topics in the heavy ion community. In the weak coupling picture this thermalization occurs from “the bottom up”: high energy partons, formed early in the collision, radiate low energy gluons which then proceed to equilibrate among themselves, forming a thermal bath that brings the high energy sector to equilibrium. In this scheme we apply a model on parton energy loss to discuss the effects of medium expansion on the thermalization problem and estimate the average transverse momentum diffusivity for thermalization in a Bjorken expanding medium.

The global geometrical property of jet events in high-energy nuclear collisions

We present the first theoretical study of medium modifications of the global geometrical pattern, i.e., transverse sphericity ($$S_{\perp }$$ S ⊥ ) distribution of jet events with parton energy loss in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In our investigation, POWHEG + PYTHIA is employed to make an accurate description of transverse sphericity in the p + p baseline, which combines the next-to-leading order (NLO) pQCD calculations with the matched parton shower (PS). The Linear Boltzmann Transport (LBT) model of the parton energy loss is implemented to simulate the in-medium evolution of jets. We calculate the event normalized transverse sphericity distribution in central Pb + Pb collisions at the LHC, and give its medium modifications. An enhancement of transverse sphericity distribution at small $$S_{\perp }$$ S ⊥ region but a suppression at large $$S_{\perp }$$ S ⊥ region are observed in A + A collisions as compared to their p + p references, which indicates that in overall the geometry of jet events in Pb + Pb becomes more pencil-like. We demonstrate that for events with 2 jets in the final-state of heavy-ion collisions, the jet quenching makes the geometry more sphere-like with medium-induced gluon radiation. However, for events with $$\ge 3$$ ≥ 3 jets, parton energy loss in the QCD medium leads to the events more pencil-like due to jet number reduction, where less energetic jets may lose their energies and then fall off the jet selection kinematic cut. These two effects offset each other and in the end result in more jetty events in heavy-ion collisions relative to that in p + p.