Jet Quenching in Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC and at the LHC

by Dr Urs Wiedemann (CERN)

Tuesday 20 Jan 2009, 16:45 → 18:15 Europe/Berlin

Universe

The wider kinematical range accessible in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC collider energies opens novel opportunities for studying the properties of dense QCD matter. In particular, a large class of abundantly produced high transverse momentum processes is highly sensitive to medium properties due to the dramatic phenomenon of jet quenching. After a short general introduction to the physics of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, I shall discuss what is experimentally known about jet quenching mainly from the leading hadron suppression measured at RHIC, and what will soon become experimentally accessible at the LHC. I then discuss recent approaches towards addressing the resulting theoretical challenges, paying particular attention to Monte Carlo simulations of jet quenching, and to reformulations of parton energy loss in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence.