James Mulligan

Droplets of deconfined quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma, are produced experimentally in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Studying this deconfined matter may allow insight into a variety of open questions about the high temperature regime of QCD and the emergent behaviors of QCD. One major effort to probe the quark-gluon plasma is the study of high-momentum jets produced in an initial high momentum-transfer scattering of a heavy-ion collision. Measurements have demonstrated that by traversing the dense plasma, jets are modified in several ways, including that jet yields are suppressed in heavy-ion collisions relative to proton-proton collisions. The ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider reconstructs jets with high-precision tracking of charged particles combined with particle information from the electromagnetic calorimeter, achieving a unique kinematic range of jets extending to low jet momenta. This thesis describes inclusive jet measurements in Pb–Pb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV with ALICE, which constitute the first such full jet measurements at low transverse jet momentum at this collision energy. These measurements are compared to several theoretical predictions, and will help constrain models of jet energy loss.