Unraveling gluon jet quenching through J=ik production in heavy-ion collisions

Jet quenching has long been regarded as one of the key signatures for the formation of quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions. Despite significant efforts, the separate identification of quark and gluon jet quenching has remained as a challenge. Here we show that J=ik in high transverse momentum (pT) region provides a uniquely sensitive probe of in-medium gluon energy loss since its production at high pT is particularly dominated by gluon fragmentation. Such gluon-dominance is first demonstrated for the baseline of proton-proton collisions within the framework of leading power non-relativistic quantum chromodynamics factorization formalism. We then use the linear Boltzmann transport model combined with hydrodynamics for the simulation of jet-medium interaction in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The sat-isfactory description of experimental data on both nuclear modification factor RAA and elliptic flow v2 reveals, for the first time, that the gluon jet quenching is the driving force for high pT J=ik suppression. This novel finding is further confirmed by the data-driven Bayesian analyses of relevant experimental measurements, from which we also obtain the first quantitative extraction of the gluon energy loss dis-tribution in the quark-gluon plasma.(c) 2023 Science China Press. Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science China Press. All rights reserved.