Experimental overview of high pT results at RHIC
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
High transverse momentum (pT) particles, originating from hard-scattered partons, hold the promise of probing the medium created in heavy-ion collisions. In the last 7 years, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has provided a wealth of high pT probes. An overview of high pT results from RHIC will be presented with a focus on what is not yet understood. Our current understanding of parton energy loss from single-particle measurements will be reviewed, including what has been added to our (possible lack of) understanding from more recent heavy-flavor results. Di-hadron correlation measurements have provided more differential information to help understand the modification of jets due to the medium, but can be interpreted as being only from surface emission, which questions the value of high pT particles as true probes of the medium. The future of photon-hadron correlation measurements, in conjunction with the di-hadron measurements, will hopefully add to our understanding of the energy loss mechanism. Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.
