Speaker
Description
Jets, clusters of collimated particles, produced from parton scatterings in high energy
proton-proton collisions are an effective tool to study the internal proton structure. At center of mass
energies of $\sqrt{s} = $ 200 and 510 GeV, jet production is dominated by the quark-gluon, $qg$ and
gluon-gluon, $gg$, scattering processes. The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has measured a series of jet asymmetries in the pseudo-rapidity range, $-1 < \eta < 2$, in longitudinally polarized $pp$ collisions to constrain the gluon polarization in the proton. Similarly jet cross-section measurements for unpolarized $pp$ collisions are an excellent probe to constrain the unpolarized gluon distribution. In this talk the STAR jet cross-section measurements in two $\eta$ ranges, $ |\eta| < 0.5$ and $ 0.5 < |\eta| < 0.9$ for $510$ GeV $pp$ data are presented. The techniques used in this analysis, such as the underlying event correction to the jet energy and the unfolding procedure that maps the detector-level jet quantities to physics quantities at the particle level are described. Their impact on the unpolarized proton parton distribution functions through re-weighting is discussed.
