The appearance of monojets is among the most striking signatures of jet quenching in the context of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Experimentally, the disappearance of jets has been quantified by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations in terms of the dijet asymmetry observable $A_J$. While the experimental findings initially gave rise to claims that the measured $A_J$ would challenge the radiative energy loss paradigm, the results of a systematic investigation of $A_J$ in different models for the medium evolution and for the shower-medium interaction presented here suggest that the observed properties of $A_J$ arise fairly generically and independent of specific model assumptions for a large class of reasonable models. This would imply that, rather than posing a challenge to any particular model, the observable prompts the question of which model dynamics is incompatible with the data.

• Received 19 March 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.064908