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Description
In the established paradigm of jet quenching in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, jets from initial hard parton scatterings are suppressed due to their interaction with the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), serving as crucial tomographic probes of QGP properties. Within the linear Boltzmann transport model, we find that the QGP is also capable of absorbing and reprocessing energy deposited by the hard jets into emergent jet-like objects, providing an alternative production mechanism of thermal recoil jets. These emergent thermal recoil jets exhibit distinct transverse momentum ($p_T$) and jet cone size ($R$) dependencies different from the hard jets, and explain the puzzling RHIC and LHC observations of the enhanced yields of hadron- and photon-triggered jets at large azimuthal angle relative to the away side but solely for jets with low $p_T$ and large $R$. Markedly different behavior is predicted for hadron-triggered heavy-flavor jets, since the hard production of heavy quarks suppresses the thermal production of jets. The thermal recoil jets are predicted to have unique substructures, such as a jet shape that increases with radius, a thermal-like distribution of their constituents, and a large-angle enhancement in their energy-energy correlators, which await verification in future experimental analyses.
Reference: Peng Jing, Yichao Dang, Lejing Zhang, Yang He, Shanshan Cao, Li Yi, Xin-Nian Wang, arXiv:2512.12715, accepted by Phys. Rev. Lett.
