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Title Low energy protons as probes of hadronization dynamics
Authors Carolina Robles, Alberto Accardi, Mark Baker, William Brooks, Raphael Dupre, Mathieu Ehrhart, Jorge Lopez, Z. Tu
JLAB number JLAB-THY-22-3594
LANL number arXiv:2203.16665
Other number DOE/OR/23177-5465
Document Type(s) (Journal Article) 
Associated with EIC: No
Supported by Jefferson Lab LDRD Funding: No
Funding Source: Nuclear Physics (NP)
Other Funding:DE-SC0008791
DE-SC0012704
 

Journal
Compiled for Physical Review C
Volume 106
Issue 4
Page(s) 045202
Refereed
Publication Abstract: Energetic quarks liberated from hadrons in nuclear deep-inelastic scattering propagate through the nuclear medium, interacting with it via several processes. These include quark energy loss and nuclear interactions of forming hadrons. One manifestation of these interactions is the enhanced emission of low-energy charged particles, referred to as grey tracks. We use the theoretical components of the BeAGLE event generator to interpret grey track signatures of parton transport and hadron formation by comparing its predictions to E665 data. We extend the base version of BeAGLE by adding four different options for describing parton energy loss. The E665 data we used consists of multiplicity ratios for fixed-target scattering of 490 GeV muons on Xe normalized to deuterium as a function of the number of grey tracks. We compare multiplicity ratios for E665 grey tracks to the predictions of BeAGLE, varying the options and parameters to determine which physics phenomena can be identified by these data. We find that grey tracks are unaffected by modifications of the forward production. Thus their production must be dominated by interactions with hadrons in the backward region. This offers the advantage that selecting certain particles in the forward region is unlikely to bias a centrality selection. We see a strong correlation between the number of grey tracks and the in-medium path length. Our energy loss model does not reproduce the suppression observed in the projectile region. We see an underprediction of the proton production rate in backward kinematics, suggesting that a stronger source of interaction with the nuclear medium is needed for accurate modeling. These results lay an important foundation for future spectator tagging studies at both Jefferson Lab and at the Electron-Ion Collider, where neutron and proton grey track studies will be feasible down to very small momenta.
Experiment Numbers:
Group: THEORY CENTER
Document: pdf
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.106.045202
Accepted Manuscript: PhysRevC.106.045202.pdf
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