Towards a Unified Understanding of Jet Quenching and Elliptic Flow within Perturbative QCD Parton Transport

Abstract

The gluonic contribution to the nuclear modification factor R_AA is investigated for central Au + Au collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV employing a perturbative QCD-based parton cascade including radiative processes. A flat quenching pattern is found up to transverse momenta of 30 GeV which is slightly smaller compared with results from the Gyulassy-Levai-Vitev formalism. We demonstrate that the present microscopic transport description provides challenging means of investigating both jet-quenching and a strong buildup of elliptic flow in terms of the same standard perturbative QCD interactions.

Minor modifications to the text. Version as published in PRL 102, 202301 (2009). 4 pages, 4 figures