Soft and Collective Particle Generator for a Better Understanding of Heavy Ion Background in Jet Studies

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), nuclei are made to collide at near light-speed. These collisions generate a novel phase of matter: the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). One set of tools used to study the properties of the QGP are jets. Jets are generated early in the nuclear collision when internal quarks and gluons scatter with high momentum transfer. These quarks and gluons traverse the QGP as it forms, lose energy, and re-hadronize into collimated streams. The main difficulty in measurements of jets is the large background of spatially correlated hadrons due to the multitude of soft collisions from the expansion and cooling of the short lived QGP. We generate a data-driven background for jets based on measurements of soft charged hadron transverse momentum spectra and charged hadron azimuthal flow at the LHC. We use this data-driven background in concert with Monte-Carlo parton shower generators and jet-finding algorithms to better understand how lower momentum jets are modified. We present the current status of these studies.