Triviality of jet quenching or otherwise ?

Triviality of jet quenching or otherwise ?

all in 14 sentences

Losing energy by a body over time by doing work is an oversimplification of idea in physical world. The relevant question is, whether this law holds true even in the quantum world where our common perceptions of sense flatter our understandings.

 As for example, mimicking the microsecond Universe, the quark gluon plasma aka QGP imposes this idea of energy loss of an energetic parton* traversing through the medium quite seriously. 

Let us consider that we put twin fishes in a lake full of smaller fishes. 

One of the twins is really shy and remains at the edge of the lake and interacts very very less. 

The energetic one starts to say "Hi !!" to all he meets but every time his energy is decreasing as a result of conversations (this fish loves to talk quite a lot!) as it starts to move to the other end of the lake. 

Now, this fish is really a "superhero" fish who can disband to two smaller fishes. 

In this way, he repeatedly proves himself a superhero each and every time he meets a new fish of the lake. 
Doing so, he transfers his energy to the smaller fishes who are formed as a result of disbanding or just a small chat !

Finally, he gets tired and decides to rest with his neighbours or come out of lake exhausted. 

Now, you take out your recorder and start to hear the conversations of the fishes (or the interactions) that you have been tracking all along. 

You are smart and you calculate the final energy difference (quenching) from these interactions between the two twin fishes (or the two energetic jets of partons of the QGP) !

Equations justify the phenomena, but how to measure it experimentally where the system size (i.e. the size of the tiniest drop of liquid in the entire Universe) is just few fermi ? 

Adding to the woes, this QGP liquid exists for few yoctoseconds ! 

* quarks and gluons are collectively called partons; a collection of partons constitute a jet (or a shower)

(stay tuned for the experimental procedure)

Souvik Priyam Adhya,
Post doctoral fellow,
Charles University, Prague