Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Some Challenges and Opportunities for Hard Probes

Rainer J. Fries

Texas A&M University and RIKEN/BNL Research Center

In this talk I will review some recent ideas that might be useful to improve our ability to characterize the hot and dense medium created in high energy collisions of nuclei — e.g. at RHIC and LHC — with the help of high momentum particles (hard probes). Hadro-chemistry at large momentum carries information about the mean free path of high momentum quarks and gluons in quark gluon plasma. Initial inhomogeneities and event-by-event fluctuations bias the extraction of transport parameters and need to be taken into account. On the other hand, hard probes might enable us to estimate those inhomogeneities tomographically. I will also address the question of higher azimuthal Fourier moments at high momentum and an idea how to potentially measure or rule out the idea of anomalous jet quenching around the QCD phase transition.