High- p t and jet physics from RHIC to LHC

The observation of the strong suppression of high-p t hadrons in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL has motivated a large experimental program using hard probes to characterize the deconfined medium created. However, what can be denoted as “leading particle” physics accessible at RHIC presents some limitations which motivate at higher energy the study of much more penetrating objects: jets. The gain in center-of-mass energy expected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will definitively improve our understanding on how the energy is lost in the system, opening a major new window of study: the physics of jets on an event-by-event basis. We will concentrate on the expected performance for jet reconstruction in ALICE using the EMCal calorimete