Discovery of Jet Quenching at RHIC and the Opacity of the Produced Gluon Plasma
P. Levai, G. Papp, G. Fai, M. Gyulassy, G.G. Barnafoldi, I. Vitev, Y. Zhang
Abstract
The predicted quenching of jets in A+A at RHIC energies has been discovered by STAR and PHENIX in preliminary data reported at this conference. We apply the GLV theory of QCD radiative energy loss to estimate the opacity, L/\lambda_g, of the gluon plasma produced in Au+Au collisions at 130 AGeV. We show that (in contrast to the factor of two Cronin enhancement of \pi^0 found at the SPS by WA98) the factor of 5-8 suppression of p_T \sim 2-4 GeV \pi^0 reported by PHENIX can be accounted for with an effective static plasma opacity L/\lambda_g \approx 3-4.