Jet quenching from QCD evolution

Abstract

Recent advances in soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons have led to the development of a new method that gives a unified description of inclusive hadron production in reactions with nucleons and heavy nuclei. We show how this approach, based on the generalization of the DGLAP evolution equations to include final-state medium-induced parton showers, can be combined with initial-state effects for applications to jet quenching phenomenology. We demonstrate that the traditional parton energy loss calculations can be regarded as a special soft-gluon emission limit of the general QCD evolution framework. We present phenomenological comparison of the SCET$_{\rm G}$-based results on the suppression of inclusive charged hadron and neutral pion production in $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to experimental data. We also show theoretical predictions for the upcoming $\sqrt{s_{NN}} \simeq 5.1$ TeV Pb+Pb run at the LHC.