Jet quenching beyond the energy loss approach

Abstract

We study the jet quenching effect in heavy ion collisions, based on medium-induced splitting functions calculated from Soft Collinear Effective Theory with Glauber Gluons. Our method is formulated in the language of DGLAP evolution equations with medium-induced splitting functions. In the small-$x$ soft gluon approximation we analytically solve the evolution equations and find an intuitive connection to the energy loss approach. For central Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC we quantify the effect of finite-$x$ corrections for the nuclear modification factor and compare to data.