From Leading Hadron Suppression to Jet Quenching at RHIC and at the LHC

Abstract

In nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), one generically observes a strong medium-induced suppression of high-pT hadron production. This suppression is accounted for in models which assume a significant medium-induced radiative energy loss of high-pT parent partons produced in the collision. How can we further test the microscopic dynamics conjectured to underly this abundant high-pT phenomenon? What can we learn about the dynamics of parton fragmentation, and what can we learn about the properties of the medium which modifies it ? Given that inelastic parton scattering is expected to be the dominant source of partonic equilibration processes, can we use hard processes as an experimentally well-controlled window into QCD non-equilibrium dynamics ? Here I review what has been achieved so far, and which novel opportunities open up with higher luminosity at RHIC, and with the wider kinematical range accessible soon at the LHC.

8 pages Latex, 4 eps-figures, contribution to the proceedings of the "Hard Probes 2004" conference in Ericeira, Portugal, November 4-10, 2004

References in corpus (5)

• Leading-particle suppression in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions
• The Fragility of High-pT Hadron Spectra as a Hard Probe
• Relating high-energy lepton-hadron, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions through geometric scaling
• Measuring The Collective Flow With Jets
• Azimuthal anisotropy and correlations at large transverse momenta in $p+p$ and Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{NN}}}$= 200 GeV

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Heavy ion collisions and AdS/CFT
• Opportunities for Heavy Ion Physics at the Large Hadron Collider LHC