Seminar in Hadronic Physics

A factorization based approach to jet modification in an arbitrary medium

Abhijit Majumder

Ohio State University

Hard processes such as DIS, electron-positron annihilation, Drell-Yan pair production as well as jets in p-p collisions are well described by pQCD based on a factorization and evolution approach in the presence of a hard scale. We show that a simple extension of this approach, based on a study of corrections suppressed by powers of the hard scale but enhanced by the length of the medium, may be used to describe a wide range of phenomena in the case of jet modification in dense extended matter. This includes both cold nuclear matter and hot deconfined quark gluon plasmas. After an introduction to the underlying assumptions and a derivation of the basic jet modification formulae, we will contrast this scheme with the jet modification approach developed at McGill, based on the formalism of Arnold Moore and Yaffe. We will then apply this formalism to understand different phenomena such as single and double inclusive suppression in DIS on a large nucleus and in a heavy-ion collision. Following a discussion of the various transport coefficients, we will also discuss the calculation of heavy flavor energy loss and energy deposition.