Flavors in the Soup: An Overview of Heavy-Flavored Jet Energy Loss at CMS

Kurt E. Jung PhD, Purdue University, May 2016. Flavors in the Soup: An Overviewof Heavy-Flavored Jet Energy Loss at CMS. Major Professor: Wei Xie.The energy loss of jets in heavy-ion collisions is expected to depend on the flavorof the fragmenting parton. Thus, measurements of jet quenching as a function offlavor place powerful constraints on the thermodynamical and transport propertiesof the hot and dense medium. Measurements of the nuclear modification factorsof the heavy flavor tagged jets from charm and bottom quarks in both PbPb andpPb collisions can quantify such energy loss e↵ects. Specifically, pPb measurementsprovide crucial insights into the behavior of the cold nuclear matter e↵ect, whichis required to fully understand the hot and dense medium e↵ects on jets in PbPbcollisions. This dissertation presents the energy modification of b-jets in PbPb atppsN N = 2.76 TeV and pPb collisions at sN N = 5.02 TeV, along with the first everpmeasurements of charm jets in pPb collisions at sN N = 5.02 TeV and in pp collisionspat s = 2.76 TeV. Measurements of b-jet and c-jet spectra are compared to pp datapat s = 2.76 TeV and to PYTHIA predictions at both 2.76 and 5.02 TeV. We observea centrality-dependent suppression for b-jets in PbPb and a result that is consistentwith PYTHIA for both charm and bottom jets in pPb collisions.