Jet Tomography of Hot and Cold Nuclear Matter

Abstract

Medium modification of parton fragmentation functions induced by multiple scattering and gluon bremsstrahlung is shown to describe the recent HERMES data in deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) very well, providing the first evidence of $A^{2/3}$-dependence of the modification. The energy loss is found to be $<dE/dL>\approx 0.5$ GeV/fm for a 10-GeV quark in a $Au$ nucleus. Including the effect of expansion, analysis of the ${\pi }^0$ spectra in central $Au+Au$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=130$ GeV yields an averaged energy loss equivalent to $<dE/dL>\approx 7.3$ GeV/fm in a static medium. Predictions for central $Au+Au$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV are also given.

Comments: 4 pages in RevTex with 3 ps figures, final version published in Phys. Rev. Letters