Jet tomography of Au plus Au reactions including multi-gluon fluctuations

Jet tomography is the analysis of the attenuation pattern of high transverse momentum hadrons to determine certain line integral transforms of the density profile of the QCD matter produced in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions. In this Letter, we calculate the distortion of jet tomography due to multi-gluon fluctuations within the GLV radiative energy loss formalism. We find that fluctuations of the average gluon number, similar to 3 for RHIC initial conditions, reduce the attenuation of pions by approximately a factor Z approximate to 0.4-0.5. Therefore the plasma density inferred from jet tomography without fluctuations must be enhanced by a factor 1/Z similar to 2. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.