CFNS seminar

Jets, originating from hard scatterings of quarks/gluons (partons), have been established as a very powerful tool of study in high energy colliders. Measurements utilizing jets have been performed at nearly all major collider experiments as probes of the standard model (and BSM), spin, polarization, fundamental QCD and also played an important role in studies of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) via parton energy loss or jet quenching. Since jet evolution in vacuum is intimately dependent on both the momentum and angular scales, disentangling these scales via jet substructure (JSS) tools can lead to a more differential study of the parton shower. In essence, understanding parton evolution and JSS in vacuum is a necessary prerequisite for qualitatively describing how jets are quenched in the QGP, which in turn leads to extracting the QGP microscopic properties via jet-tomography. In this talk, I will introduce JSS and present recent measurements from the STAR collaboration of JSS observables in p-p, p+Au and Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ GeV. These results are aimed at describing the vacuum parton shower and study the impact of cold and hot nuclear matter effects differentially with jet topology. I will also discuss an important application JSS whereby we isolated a special selection of jets in heavy ion collisions who's energy loss mechanism can then be further studied in a differential fashion. I will conclude the talk by contextualizing these measurements and briefly discuss some ongoing work related to upcoming heavy ion runs at RHIC and at the recently approved EIC, where JSS can contribute towards studies of quantum entanglement and hadronization within jets in a clean environment.