Hard scattering and QCD Fundamentals at RHIC

Abstract

In 1998, at the 4th QCD workshop, Rolf Baier asked me whether jets could be measured in Au+Au collisions because he had a prediction of a QCD medium-effect (energy loss via soft gluon radiation induced by multiple scattering) on color-charged partons traversing a hot-dense-medium composed of screened color-charges. I reviewed the possibilities in a talk explaining that there was a general consensus that for Au+Au central collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV, leading particles are the only way to find jets because of the large particle density. The good news was that hard-scattering in p-p collisions was originally observed by the method of leading particles and that these techniques could be used to study hard-scattering and jets in Au+Au collisions. Notably, I described ``How everything you want to know about jets can be found using 2-particle correlations''. In fact, the predicted ``jet quenching'' and other new phenomena were discovered by this method. However, this past year, I had to soften the statement to {\em almost everything} because we found by explicit calculation in PHENIX that the away-side two-particle correlation $p_{T_a}$ spectrum from a $\pi^0$ trigger with $p_{T_t}$ is not sensitive to the fragmentation function--overturning a belief dating from the seminal paper of Feynman, Field and Fox in 1977. A new formula was derived which showed that the shape of the $p_{T_a}$ spectrum depends only on the power $n$ of the parton invariant cross section so that NLO pQCD calculations of the two particle away-side correlations are, in fact, less sensitive to the shape of the fragmentation function than calculations of the inclusive $\pi^0$ cross section.