Energy Loss and Medium Response via Two Particle Correlations in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

In these proceedings, pair correlations between high pT final-state particles in central and mid-central Au+Au are presented as a function of trigger-angle with respect to the reaction plane. Jet tomography results like these add another dimension of experimental discrimination to energy loss calculations and initial state geometric descriptions. The observed increasing away-side suppression with respect to the nuclear overlap demonstrate that back-to-back production at high pT in mid-central collisions is not dominated by unmodified production produced tangentially to the nuclear overlap. Furthermore, these results present a challenge to theories that predict only a weak variation due to angle with respect to the reaction plane.