Study of the EEC discrimination power on quark and gluon jet quenching effects in heavy-ion collisions at 5.02 TeV*

Abstract We present a systematic investigation of flavor-dependent jet quenching using energy-energy correlators (EEC) in TeV Pb+Pb collisions. Employing the improved SHELL model, which incorporates collisional and radiative energy loss, as well as medium response, we quantify distinct quenching signatures for quark and gluon jets. Key findings include: (1) Pure quark jets exhibit strong EEC enhancement at large angular scales, while gluon jets show a bimodal enhancement pattern at small and large scales; (2) Dual-shift decomposition in the EEC ratio reveals shifts toward large angles is primarily driven by energy loss, while small- shifts extend beyond selection bias and indicate intrinsic enhancement of the gluon-initiated jets; (3) Quark jets experience global suppression of averaged energy weight , whereas gluon jets exhibit concentration toward small ; (4) Mechanism decomposition identifies elastic energy loss concentrating toward small , radiative loss dominating quark jet modification, and medium response amplifying large enhancement via soft hadrons. The observed flavor dependence in EEC modifications is dominantly driven by intrinsic jet structure differences rather than medium-induced mechanisms. We propose photon-tagged jets as quark proxies and inclusive charged-hadron jets as gluon proxies, demonstrating that they reproduce the respective flavor-specific quenching patterns. Our work establishes the EEC as a precision probe of color-charge-dependent jet-medium interactions, providing new constraints for the detailed extraction and QGP tomography, while highlighting the critical role of pre-quenching flavor asymmetries.