Jet quenching in the strongly-interacting quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

We propose a hybrid model for medium-induced parton energy loss, in which the hard scales in the process are treated perturbatively, while the soft scales which involve strong coupling dynamics are modeled by AdS/CFT calculations. After fitting a single parameter on R_AA for central Au+Au collisions, we are able to predict different observables like R_AA and I_AA as a function of centrality and reaction plane. We obtain a consistent picture of how jet quenching is modified if the quark-gluon plasma is strongly interacting, and we provide quantitative predictions.

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures (modified), discussions and conclusions expanded, to be published in PLB