Quenching of high-pThadrons: Energy loss versus color transparency

Abstract

High-${p}_{T}$ hadrons produced in hard collisions and detected inclusively bear peculiar features: (i) they originate from jets whose initial virtuality and energy are of the same order and (ii) such jets are rare and have a very biased energy sharing among the particles, namely the detected hadron carries the main fraction of the jet energy. The former feature leads to an extremely intensive gluon radiation and energy dissipation at the early stage of hadronization, either in vacuum or in a medium. As a result, a leading hadron must be produced on a short length scale. Evaluation within a model of perturbative fragmentation confirms the shortness of the production length. This result is at variance with the unjustified assumption of long production length, made within the popular energy-loss scenario. Thus, we conclude that the main reason of suppression of high-${p}_{T}$ hadrons in heavy-ion collisions is the controlled-by-color-transparency attenuation of a high-${p}_{T}$ dipole propagating through the hot medium. Adjusting a single parameter, the transport coefficient, we describe quite well the data from the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider for the suppression factor ${R}_{AA}$ as function of ${p}_{T}$, collision energy, and centrality. We observe that the complementary effect of the initial-state interaction causes a flattening and even fall of ${R}_{AA}$ at large ${p}_{T}$. The azimuthal anisotropy of hadron production, calculated with no further adjustment, also agrees well with data at different energies and centralities.