Data-driven analysis methods for the measurement of reconstructed jets in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC

G. O. V. de Barros, Bo Fenton-Olsen, Peter Jacobs, Mateusz Ploskon

Published 2012-08-07, updated 2012-10-04Version 2

We present data-driven methods for the full reconstruction of jets in heavy ion collisions, for inclusive and co-incidence jet measurements at both RHIC and LHC. The complex structure of heavy ion events generates a large background of combinatorial jets, and smears the measured energy of the true hard jet signal. Techniques to correct for these background effects can induce biases in the reported jet distributions, which must be well controlled for accurate measurement of jet quenching. Using model studies, we evaluate the proposed methods for measuring jet distributions accurately while minimizing the fragmentation bias of the measured population.