Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The recently measured centrality dependence of high energy jets in proton-lead collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is investigated. We hypothesize that events with jets of very high energy (a few hundred GeV) are characterized by a suppressed number of soft particles, thus shifting these events into more peripheral bins. This naturally results in the suppression (enhancement) of the nuclear modification factor, RpA, in central (peripheral) collisions. Our calculations suggest that a moderate suppression of the order of 20%, for 103 GeV jets, can quantitatively reproduce the experimental data. We further extract the suppression factor as a function of jet energy and test our conjecture using available RpA data for various centralities.