Abstract. Standard jet-finding techniques used in elementary particle collisions have not been successful in the high track density of heavy-ion collisions. This paper describes a modified cone-type jet-finding algorithm developed for the complex environment of heavy-ion collisions. The primary modification to the algorithm is the evaluation and subtraction of the large background energy, arising from uncorrelated soft hadrons, in each collision. A detailed analysis of the background energy and its event-by-event fluctuations has been performed on simulated data, and a method developed to estimate the background energy inside the jet cone from the measured energy outside the cone on an event-by-event basis. The algorithm has been tested using Monte Carlo simulations of Pb+Pb collisions at for the ALICE detector at the LHC. The algorithm can reconstruct jets with a transverse energy of 50 GeV and above with an energy resolution of ~30%.

Print publication: Issue 2 (February 2007)
Received 15 September 2006
Published 11 December 2006