Cherenkov Radiation from Jets in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

The possibility of Cherenkov-like gluon bremsstrahlung in dense matter is studied. We point out that the occurrence of Cherenkov radiation in dense matter is sensitive to the presence of partonic bound states. This is illustrated by a calculation of the dispersion relation of a massless particle in a simple model in which it couples to two different massive resonance states. We further argue that detailed spectroscopy of jet correlations can directly probe the index of refraction of this matter, which in turn will provide information about the mass scale of these partonic bound states.