Jet quenching as a probe of gluon plasma formation

Abstract

We study, in a pQCD calculation augmented by nuclear effects, the jet energy loss needed to reproduce the pi^0 spectra in Au+Au collisions at large p_T, measured by PHENIX at RHIC. The transverse width of the parton momentum distributions (intrinsic-k_T) is used phenomenologically to obtain a reliable baseline pp result. Jet quenching is applied to the nuclear spectra (including shadowing and multiscattering) to fit the data.

Comments: Presented at the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics (HEP2001), Budapest, Hungary, 12-18 July 2001. 7 pages in Latex, 2 EPS figures