| Abstract: | The collision of relativistic heavy-ion such as the AuAu-collisions studied at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider produce a hot, dense medium with properties consistent with that of a state of matter in which quarks and gluons become deconfined, the Quark-Gluon Plasma. Collimated sprays of hadrons known as jets are produced by the fragmentation of quarks and gluons during the early stages of a heavy-ion collision, and offer a valuable probe of this medium. In particular, jets recoiling from energetic direct photons offer a "golden channel" through which we may study the complex dynamics of the medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. However, to understand the interplay between jets and the produced medium, a high-precision reference is needed in which no medium is produced. Thus, this thesis presents a high precision measurement of the semi-inclusive yields of charged jets recoiling from energetic Îđdir and Ï⁰¹́ʻ triggers in ⁸́₍s = 200 GeV pp-collisions recorded by the STAR detector during the 2009 running year. The recoil jets were reconstructed from charged particles using the anti-kT algorithm with jet resolution parameters 0.2 and 0.5. A regularized unfolding scheme was employed to correct the measured per-trigger recoil jet yields for finite reconstruction efficiency and resolution. The energy resolution of the triggers was assessed using a simulation of the STAR electromagnetic calorimeter. The effect of a finite trigger resolution was applied to recoil jet spectra generated by PYTHIA 8.185 using a weighting scheme, and the corrected data were compared against the weighted recoil jet spectra from PYTHIA 8.185. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/197374 |
|---|