Jet Tomography of High-Energy Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at Next-to-Leading Order

We demonstrate that jet observables are highly sensitive to the characteristics of the vacuum and the in-medium QCD parton showers and propose techniques that exploit this sensitivity to constrain the mechanism of quark and gluon energy loss in strongly interacting plasmas. As a first example, we calculate the inclusive jet cross section in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions to O(alpha(3)(s)). Theoretical predictions for the medium-induced jet broadening and the suppression of the jet production rate due to cold and hot nuclear matter effects in Au + Au and Cu + Cu reactions at RHIC are presented.