Evidence for parton energy loss in oxygenoxygen collisions at TeV
ALICE Collaboration
Ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions create a hot and dense medium of deconfined quarks and gluons, the quarkgluon plasma (QGP), in which parton energy loss ("jet quenching") is a key probe of hot medium properties. While parton energy loss has been firmly established in large systems such as PbPb and AuAu collisions, no unambiguous direct evidence exists in smaller systems such as high-multiplicity pPb and pp collisions. To probe the onset of parton energy loss at intermediate system size, measurements of neutral-pion production are presented in this Letter for oxygenoxygen (OO) and protonoxygen (pO) collisions recorded with the ALICE detector in July 2025, relative to a pp baseline. The nuclear modification factor is suppressed relative to unity with a transverse-momentum dependence similar to that observed in PbPb collisions, consistent with a previous CMS measurement in OO collisions with charged particles. As contains contributions from both cold and hot nuclear matter effects, is also presented in order to constrain cold nuclear matter (CNM) contributions. is found to be compatible with unity, indicating that CNM effects alone cannot account for the suppression observed in . Final-state effects are isolated using the measured double ratio , which largely cancels CNM contributions and exhibits a significant suppression relative to expectations without energy loss at a 4.9 level. Theoretical models incorporating parton energy loss via different mechanisms predict a significant suppression of the relative to unity, consistent with the data. These findings establish parton energy loss in OO collisions, extending experimental evidence for jet quenching to the smallest nuclear system studied to date.