Medium-induced fragmentation and equilibration of highly energetic partons

Abstract

We investigate the energy loss and equilibration of highly energetic particles/jets inside a QCD medium. Based on an effective kinetic description of QCD, including $2\leftrightarrow 2$ elastic processes, radiative $1\leftrightarrow 2$ processes, as well as the back-reaction of jet constituents onto the thermal medium, we describe the in-medium evolution of jets from the energy scale of the jet $\sim E$ all the way to the medium scale $\sim T$. While elastic processes and back-reaction are important to describe the equilibration of soft fragments of the jet, we find that the energy loss is dominated by an inverse turbulent cascade due to successive radiative branchings, which has interesting implications for the energy spectra and chemistry of jet fragments.

Comments: 42 pages, 9 figures