Jet Energy Loss in Hot and Dense Matter

Abstract

We discuss the the GLV Reaction Operator formalism for computing the non-abelian energy loss of jets propagating through hot and dense matter. We incorporate our results on induced gluon bremsstrahlung together with the effects of nuclear shadowing and multiple scattering in a two component soft+hard description of heavy ion reactions at RHIC energies. We demonstrate that good agreement between data and theory can be achieved in the measured moderate p_T <= 5 GeV window at root(s)=130 AGeV and we extend our predictions for the high p_T part of the hadronic spectra. We focus on the perspectives of using jet tomographic methods for probing not only the density and geometry of the quark-gluon plasma but also its parton composition at various center of mass energies.