Jet Quenching: the medium modification of the single and double fragmentation functions

The physics of the quenching of hard jets in dense matter is briefly reviewed. This is presented within the framework of the partonic medium modification of the fragmentation functions. Modifications in both deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) off large nuclei and high-energy heavy-ion collisions are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of the First Meeting of the APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physics, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, Oct 24-26, 200

Deciphering Deconfinement in Correlations of Conserved Charges

Diagonal and off-diagonal flavor and conserved charge susceptibilities reveal the prevalent degrees of freedom of heated strongly interacting matter. Results obtained from lattice simulations are compared with various model estimates in an effort to weed down various possible pictures of a quark gluon plasma. We argue that the vanishing of the off-diagonal quark flavor susceptibilities and its derivatives with respect to chemical potential, at temperatures above 1.5Tc, can only be understood in a picture of a gas or liquid composed of quasi-particles which carry the same quantum numbers as quarks and antiquarks. A potential new observable, blind to neutral and non-strange particles, is introduced and related via isospin symmetry to the ratio of susceptibilities of baryonic strangeness to strangeness generated in the excited matter created at RHIC.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, LATEX, To appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter, Los Angeles, CA, Mar 26-31, 200

Universality in Fluid Domain Coarsening: The case of vapor-liquid transition

Domain growth during the kinetics of phase separation is studied following vapor-liquid transition in a single component Lennard-Jones fluid. Results are analyzed after appropriately mapping the continuum snapshots obtained from extensive molecular dynamics simulations to a simple cubic lattice. For near critical quench interconnected domain morphology is observed. A brief period of slow diffusive growth is followed by a linear viscous hydrodynamic growth that lasts for an extended period of time. This result is in contradiction with earlier inclusive reports of late time growth exponent 1/2 that questions the uniqueness of the non-equilibrium universality for liquid-liquid and vapor-liquid transitions.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Jet modification in three dimensional fluid dynamics at next-to-leading twist

The modification of the single inclusive spectrum of high transverse momentum ($p_T$) pions emanating from an ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collision is investigated. The deconfined sector is modelled using a full three dimensional (3-D) ideal fluid dynamics simulation. Energy loss of high $p_T$ partons and the ensuing modification of their fragmentation is calculated within perturbative QCD at next-to-leading twist, where the magnitude of the higher twist contribution is modulated by the entropy density extracted from the 3-D fluid dynamics simulation. The nuclear modification factor ($R_{AA}$) for pions with a $p_T \geq 8$ GeV as a function of centrality as well as with respect to the reaction plane is calculated. The magnitude of contributions to the differential $R_{AA}$ within small angular ranges, from various depths in the dense matter is extracted from the calculation and demonstrate the correlation of the length integrated density and the $R_{AA}$ from a given depth. The significance of the mixed and hadronic phase to the overall magnitude of energy loss are explored.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Revte