Multiparton Tomography of Hot and Cold Nuclear Matter

Abstract

Multiple parton interactions in relativistic heavy ion reactions result in transverse momentum diffusion and medium induced non-Abelian energy loss of the hard probes traversing cold and hot nuclear matter. A systematic study of the interplay of nuclear effects on the $p_T \geq 2$ GeV inclusive hadron spectra demonstrates that the competition between nuclear shadowing, multiple scattering and jet quenching leads to distinctly different enhancement/suppression of moderate and high-$p_T$ hadron production in $d+Au$ and $Au+Au$ collisions at RHIC. The associated increase of di-jet acoplanarity, measured via the broadening of the back-to-back di-hadron correlation function, provides an additional experimental tool to test the difference in the dynamical properties of the media created in such reactions.