Research Grants Program Office

Back-to-back light and heavy flavor dijet measurements are promising experimental channels to accurately study the physics of jet production and propagation in a dense QCD medium. They can provide new insights into the path length, color charge, and mass dependence of quark and gluon energy loss in the quark-gluon plasma produced in reactions of ultra-relativistic nuclei. To this end, we perform a comprehensive study of both light and heavy flavor dijet production in heavy ion collisions. We propose the modification of dijet invariant mass distributions in such reactions as a novel observable that shows enhanced sensitivity to the QGP transport properties and heavy quark mass effects on in-medium parton showers. This is achieved through the addition of the jet quenching effects on the individual jets as opposed to their subtraction. The latter drives the subtle effects on more conventional observables, such as the dijet momentum imbalance shifts, which we also calculate here. Results are presented in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV for comparison to data at the Large Hadron Collider and in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV to guide the future sPHENIX program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.