Extraction of correlated jet pair signals in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Multiparticle correlation techniques are frequently used to study jet shapes and yields in hadronic and nuclear collisions. To date, a standard assumption applied in such analyses is that the observed correlations arise from either jets and associated hard scattering phenomena, or from a background component due to combinatorial pairs connected only through whole event correlations. Within this assumption of two essentially independent sources, a fundamental problem centers around determining the relative contributions of each component. We discuss the methods commonly used to establish the background yield in jet correlation analyses, with a full explanation of the absolute background normalization technique which establishes the background yield without assumptions about the shape of jet correlations. This is especially important in relativistic heavy ion collisions where the jet shapes are significantly distorted from the well separated back-to-back dijets observed in proton-proton collisions.