Introductory lectures on jet quenching in heavy ion collisions

Understand

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.