Global extraction of the jet transport coefficient in cold nuclear matter

Abstract

Within the framework of the generalized QCD factorization formalism, a set of nuclear-dependent observables all arise from the quark-gluon and gluon-gluon correlation functions, which are closely connected to the well-known jet transport coefficient ($\stackrel{^}{q}$) for the nucleus. In this paper, we perform the first global analysis of $\stackrel{^}{q}$ for cold nuclear matter with a kinematics dependent parametrization. The analysis takes into account the world data on transverse momentum broadening in semi-inclusive electron-nucleus deep inelastic scattering, Drell-Yan dilepton and heavy quarkonium production in proton-nucleus collisions, as well as the nuclear modification of the structure functions in deep inelastic scattering, comprising a total of 215 data points from 8 datasets. Within our scheme, we clarify quantitatively the universality and kinematics dependence of the nuclear medium property as encoded in $\stackrel{^}{q}$. We expect that the determined parametrization of $\stackrel{^}{q}$ in cold nuclear matter will have significant impact on precise identification of the transport property of hot dense medium created in heavy ion collisions.