Effects of cold nuclear matter energy loss on inclusive jet production in p plus A collisions at energies available at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Recent measurements of the centrality and rapidity dependence of single inclusive jet production in p + Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have revealed large and nontrivial nuclear modification of the production cross section for this process. In this paper, we explore to what extent such nuclear modification can be understood by the framework of standard cold nuclear matter effects, in particular initial-state cold nuclear matter energy loss. We demonstrate quantitatively that theoretical calculations which include medium-induced radiative corrections can describe rather reasonably the attenuation of the jet production yields in the large transverse momentum region in d + Au collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and p + Pb collisions at the LHC for central to semicentral collisions. We further show that the observed scaling behavior of the nuclear modification factor as a function of the total jet energy p(T) cosh(y) for various rapidity intervals has a natural explanation in the picture of cold nuclear matter energy loss. However, the observed enhancement in peripheral collisions is not described in this picture and could have a different origin.