Baryon enhancement in jets

Abstract

The enhancement of the baryon production relative to mesons in small-collision systems is considered a breakthrough result of the Large Hadron Collider since a similar effect in heavy-ion collisions is understood by invoking the formation of the strongly-interacting quark--gluon plasma. In this letter, a baryon enhancement is reported for $p_{\mathrm{T}}^{\mathrm{ch},\mathrm{jet}}>15$\,GeV/$c$ jets produced in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$\,TeV simulated with PYTHIA8. The effect can be explained as a transition between quark-initiated jets (low jet multiplicities) to gluon-initiated jets (high jet multiplicities). The present result challenges the interpretation about the multiplicity dependence of the baryon enhancement in terms of collective expansion of the medium and quark recombination.

Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures