Azimuthal Jet Tomography of Quark Gluon Plasmas at RHIC and LHC

Abstract

Recent data on the azimuthal and transverse momentum dependence of high-pT>10 GeV pion nuclear modification factors in nuclear collisions at RHIC/BNL and LHC/CERN are analyzed in terms of a wide class of jet-energy loss models and a variety of transverse expanding collective flow backgrounds. RHIC data at 200 AGeV are found to be surprisingly consistent with rather different dE/dx models when coupled to recent 2+1D minimally viscous QGP flow field predictions. However, extrapolations to LHC, with parameters fixed at RHIC, favor running coupling QCD based energy-loss models over fixed coupling QCD, conformal AdS holography, or Tc-dominated jet-energy loss models that tend to overpredict jet quenching at the LHC.