Jet (particle physics)

A jet is a narrow cone of hadrons and other particles produced by the hadronization of a quark or gluon in a particle physics or heavy ion experiment. Particles carrying a color charge, such as quarks, cannot exist in free form because of QCD confinement which only allows for colorless states. When an object containing color charge fragments, each fragment carries away some of the color charge. In order to obey confinement, these fragments create other colored objects around them to form colorless objects. The ensemble of these objects is called a jet. Jets are measured in particle detectors and studied in order to determine the properties of the original quarks.

In relativistic heavy ion physics, jets are important because the originating hard scattering is a natural probe for the QCD matter created in the collision, and indicate its phase. When the QCD matter undergoes a phase crossover into quark gluon plasma, the energy loss in the medium grows significantly, effectively quenching the outgoing jet.

Example of jet analysis techniques are:

The Lund string model is an example of a jet fragmentation model.

Jets are produced in QCD hard scattering processes, creating high transverse momentum quarks or gluons, or collectively called partons in the partonic picture.

The probability of creating a certain set of jets is described by the jet production cross section, which is an average of elementary perturbative QCD quark, antiquark, and gluon processes, weighted by the parton distribution functions. For the most frequent jet pair production process, the two particle scattering, the jet production cross section in a hadronic collision is given by

${\displaystyle \sigma _{ij\rightarrow k}=\sum _{i,j}\int dx_{1}dx_{2}d{\hat {t}}f_{i}^{1}(x_{1},Q^{2})f_{j}^{2}(x_{2},Q^{2}){\frac {d{\hat {\sigma }}_{ij\rightarrow k}}{d{\hat {t}}}},}$

...
Wikipedia