Exploring Jet-Hadron correlations at the LHC with ALICE

In relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the conditions are met to produce the hot and dense, strongly interacting medium known as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). The QGP, a state of matter created shortly after the Big Bang, is a phase where the deconfinement of quarks and gluons is hypothesized. Jets, the collimated sprays of hadrons from fragmenting partons, are a key probe of the medium. The experimental methods used for jet measurements at ALICE to remove, reduce, and correct for the underlying background event will be presented. In pp collisions, jet production is well understood within the framework of perturbative QCD and acts as a rigorous baseline measurement for jet quenching measurements. By comparing to heavy ion collision systems, we can study the suppression of the number of jets seen and study the modification of the p_T or angular distributions of jet fragments. Azimuthal angular correlations of charged hadrons with respect to the axis of a full (charged + neutral) reconstructed (trigger) jet in Pb-Pb and pp collisions at √s_NN = 2.76 TeV in ALICE will be presented here. Newly developed combinatoric background subtraction methods and their improvement compared to prior techniques will be discussed. (paper)