Axel Drees<br>

Experimental Nuclear and Heavy Ion Physics, 
    Physics and Astronomy, SUNY Stony Brook <br>

<i>Jet Quenching and the
    Quark Gluon Plasma at RHIC</i><p> 

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With the launch of BNL's relativistic heavy ion collider, RHIC, we have
stepped into a new era of high energy nuclear physics. The first three
successful running campaigns with Au-Au, p-p, and d-Au collisions have
brought a wealth of physics results, the most exciting being the discovery of
suppressed production of high momentum hadrons in central Au-Au collisions.
The data have been interpreted as "jet quenching" owing to huge energy loss
by rapidly moving partons in a quark gluon plasma.  However, alternative
explanations exist, which cannot not be ruled out on the basis of Au-Au data
alone.  Over the past weeks, however, new results from d-Au collisions have
emerged.  They rule out extant alternative explanations of jet quenching and
hence support the conjecture that quark matter is formed at RHIC.

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