Systematics of parton-medium interaction from RHIC to LHC

Abstract

Despite a wealth of experimental data for high-P_T processes in heavy-ion collisions, discriminating between different models of hard parton-medium interactions has been difficult. A key reason is that the pQCD parton spectrum at RHIC is falling so steeply that distinguishing even a moderate shift in parton energy from complete parton absorption is essentially impossible. In essence, energy loss models are effectively only probed in the vicinity of zero energy loss and, as a result, at RHIC energies only the pathlength dependence of energy loss offers some discriminating power. At LHC however, this is no longer the case: Due to the much flatter shape of the parton p_T spectra originating from 2.76 AGeV collisions, the available data probe much deeper into the model dynamics. A simultaneous fit of the nuclear suppression at both RHIC and LHC energies thus has great potential for discriminating between various models that yield equally good descriptions of RHIC data alone.

Talk given at Quark Matter 2011, 22-28 May 2011, Annecy, France

References in corpus (12)

• Suppression of charged particle production at large transverse momentum in central Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76$ TeV
• Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma
• Space-time evolution of bulk QCD matter
• Multiplicity scaling in ideal and viscous hydrodynamics
• Event-by-event hydrodynamics and elliptic flow from fluctuating initial state
• Parton shower evolution in a 3-d hydrodynamical medium
• Systematics of the charged-hadron P_T spectrum and the nuclear suppression factor in heavy-ion collisions from sqrt{s}=200 GeV to sqrt{s} =2.76 TeV
• A systematic comparison of jet quenching in different fluid-dynamical models
• The Phenomenology of Elastic Energy Loss
• Pathlength dependence of energy loss within in-medium showers
• Energy loss in a fluctuating hydrodynamical background
• Monte Carlo Simulation for Elastic Energy Loss of Hard Partons in a Hydrodynamical Background

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Constraints on the Path-Length Dependence of Jet Quenching in Nuclear Collisions at RHIC and LHC
• Flow in heavy-ion collisions - Theory Perspective