Hard Probes at RHIC

Abstract

Measurements of jets and heavy flavour, the so called hard probes, play a crucial role in understanding properties of hot and dense nuclear matter created in high energy heavy-ion collisions. The measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) showed that in central Au+Au collisons at RHIC energy ( √sNN = 200 GeV) the nuclear matter created has properties close to those of perfect liquid, manifests partonic degrees of freedom and is opaque to hard probes. In order to draw quantitative conclusions on properties of this hot and dense nuclear matter reference measurements in proton-proton collisions and d+Au collisions are essential to estimate cold nuclear matter effects. In this proceedings a review of recent results on hard probes measurements in p+p, d+Au and A+A collisions as well as of beam energy dependence of jet quenching from STAR and PHENIX experiments at RHIC is presented.