Theory summary. Hard Probes 2012

I provide a summary of the theoretical talks in Hard Probes 2012 together with some personal thoughts about the present and the future of the field.Comment: 8 pages. Proceedings of the conference Hard Probes 2012 - Sardinia - Italy - May 27 -June 1 2012 --- Comments welcom

Hard QCD probes to quark-gluon plasma

Completely unexplored regimes of QCD, dominated by high-density/temperature effects, are available in heavy ion experiments at collider energies. The successful RHIC program shows how relevant the high transverse momentum part of the spectrum is for the characterization of the properties of the created medium. It points, as well, to interesting properties of the nuclear wave function at small fraction of momentum x, probably dominated by saturated color fields. In both domains, the imminent LHC program will provide a phase space enlarged by orders of magnitude with respect to those studied at RHIC. I will review the present status of hard probes in heavy ion collisions as well as the expectations for the LHC.Comment: 8 pages, invited talk at the YKIS Seminar on New Frontiers in QC

Introductory lectures on jet quenching in heavy ion collisions

Jet quenching has become an essential signal for the characterization of the medium formed in experiments of heavy-ion collisions. After a brief introduction to the field, we present the full derivation of the medium-induced gluon radiation spectrum, starting from the diagrammatical origin of the Wilson lines and the medium averages and including all intermediate steps. The application of this spectrum to actual phenomenological calculations is then presented, making comparisons with experimental data and indicating some improvements of the formalism to the future LHC program. The last part of the lectures reviews calculations based on the AdS/CFT correspondence on the medium parameters controlling the jet quenching phenomenon.Comment: 63 pages, 17 figures, Presented at the XLVII Cracow School of Theoretical Physics, Zakopane, Poland, June 14-22, 200

Jet Shapes in Opaque Media

We present general arguments, based on medium-induced radiative energy loss, which reproduce the non-gaussian shapes of away-side di-jet azimuthal correlations found in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC. A rather simple generalization of the Sudakov form factors to opaque media allowing an effective description of the experimental data is proposed.Comment: 4 pages, 2 ps figure