Jet quenching phenomenology from soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons.

ABSTRACT

We present the first application of a recently developed effective theory of jet propagation in matter, soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons (SCET_{G}), to inclusive hadron suppression in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and the LHC. SCET_{G}-based splitting kernels allow us to go beyond the traditional energy loss approximation and unify the treatment of vacuum and medium-induced parton showers. In the soft gluon emission limit, we establish a simple analytic relation between the QCD evolution and energy loss approaches to jet quenching. We quantify the uncertainties associated with the implementation of the in-medim modification of hadron production cross sections and show that the coupling between the jet and the medium can be constrained with better than 10% accuracy.