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During the 5-year funding period (2010-2015), the JET Collaboration carried out a comprehensive research program with coordinated efforts involving all PI members and external associated members according to the plan and milestones outlined in the approved JET proposal. We identified important issues in the study of parton energy loss and made significant progress toward NLO calculations; advanced event-by-event hydrodynamic simulations of bulk matter evolution; developed Monte Carlo tools that combine different parton energy loss approaches, hydrodynamic models and parton recombination model for jet hadronization; and carried out the first comprehensive phenomenological study to extract the jet transport parameter.

Partons produced in the early stage of non-central heavy-ioncollisionscan develop a longitudinal fluid shear because of unequal localnumber densities of participant target and projectile nucleons. Undersuch fluid shear, local parton pairs with non-vanishing impact parameterhave finite local relative orbital angular momentum along the directionopposite to the reaction plane. Such finite relative orbitalangularmomentum among locally interacting quark pairs can lead to global quarkpolarization along the same direction due to spin-orbital coupling. Locallongitudinal fluid shear is estimated within both Landau fireball andBjorken scaling model of initial parton production. Quark polarizationthrough quark-quark scatterings with the exchange of a thermal gluon iscalculated beyond small-angle scattering approximation in a quark-gluonplasma. The polarization is shown to have a non-monotonic dependence onthe local relative orbital angular momentum dictated by the interplaybetween electric and magnetic interaction. It peaks at a value ofrelative orbital angular momentum which scales with the magnetic mass ofthe exchanged gluons. With the estimated small longitudinal fluid shearin semi-peripheral Au+Au collisions at the RHIC energy, the final quarkpolarization is found to be small left hbar P_q right hbar<0.04 inthe weak coupling limit. Possible behavior of the quark polarization inthe strong coupling limit and implications on the experimental detectionof such global quark polarization at RHIC and LHC are alsodiscussed.

Produced partons have large local relative orbital angular momentum along the direction opposite to the reaction plane in the early stage of non-central heavy-ion collisions. Parton scattering is shown to polarize quarks along the same direction due to spin-orbital coupling.Such global quark polarization will lead to many observable consequences, such as left-right asymmetry of hadron spectra, global transverse polarization of thermal photons, dileptons and hadrons. Hadrons from the decay of polarized resonances will have azimuthal asymmetry similar to the elliptic flow. Global hyperon polarization is predicted with indifferent hadronization scenarios and can be easily tested.

Multiple scattering, modified fragmentation functions and radiative energy loss of a heavy quark propagating in a nuclear medium are investigated in perturbative QCD. Because of the quark mass dependence of the gluon formation time, the medium size dependence of heavy quark energy loss is found to change from a linear to a quadratic form when the initial energy and momentum scale are increased relative to the quark mass. The radiative energy loss is also significantly suppressed relative to a light quark due to the suppression of collinear gluon emission by a heavy quark.

Multiple parton scattering and induced parton energy loss in deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) off heavy nuclei is studied within the framework of generalized factorization in perturbative QCD with a complete calculation beyond the helicity amplitude (or soft bremsstrahlung) approximation. Such a calculation gives rise to new corrections to the modified quark fragmentation functions. The effective parton energy loss is found to be reduced by a factor of 5/6 from the result of helicity amplitude approximation.

Multiple scattering, induced radiative energy loss and modified fragmentation functions of a heavy quark in nuclear matter are studied within the framework of generalized factorization in perturbative QCD. Modified heavy quark fragmentation functions and energy loss are derived in detail with illustration of the mass dependencies of the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal interference effects and heavy quark energy loss. Due to the quark mass dependence of the gluon formation time, the nuclear size dependencies of nuclear modification of the heavy quark fragmentation function and heavy quark energy loss are found to change from a linear to a quadratic form when the initial energy and momentum scale are increased relative to the quark mass. The radiative energy loss of the heavy quark is also significantly suppressed due to limited cone of gluon radiation imposed by the mass. Medium modification of the heavy quark fragmentation functions is found to be limited to the large z region due to the form of heavy quark fragmentation functions in vacuum.

Multiple parton scattering and induced parton energy loss are studied in deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) off nuclei. The effect of multiple scattering of a highly off-shell quark and the induced parton energy loss is expressed in terms of the modification to the quark fragmentation functions. The authors derive such modified quark fragmentation functions and their QCD evolution equations in DIS using the generalized factorization of higher twist parton distributions. They consider double-hard and hard-soft parton scattering as well as their interferences in the same framework. The final result, which depends on both the diagonal and off-diagonal twist-four parton distributions in nuclei, demonstrates clearly the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal interference features and predicts a unique nuclear modification of the quark fragmentation functions.

Recent progresses in the study of jet modification in hotmedium and their consequences in high-energy heavy-ion collisions are reviewed. In particular, I will discuss energy loss for propagating heavy quarks and the resulting modified fragmentation function. Medium modification of the parton fragmentation function due to quark recombination are formulated within finite temperature field theory and their implication on the search for deconfined quark-gluon plasma is also discussed.

We discuss the consequence of global polarization of the produced quarks in non-central heavy-ion collisions on the spin alignment of vector mesons. We show that the alignment is quite different for different hadronization scenarios. These results can be tested directly by measuring the vector mesons' alignment through angular distributions of the decay products with respect to the reaction plane. Such angular distributions will give rise to azimuthal anisotropy v₂ of the decay products in the collision frame. Constraints provided by the data on the azimuthal anisotropy of hadron spectra at RHIC points to a quark recombination scenario of hadronization.