Centrality dependence of high energy jets in p+Pb collisions at the LHC

The recently measured centrality dependence of high energy jets in proton-lead collisions at the 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, $R_{pA}$, in central (peripheral) collisions. Our calculations suggest that a moderate suppression of the order of $20\mathrm{\%}$, for ${10}^3$ 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 $R_{pA}$ data for various centralities.