Preface

Summary

Commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in late summer 2009 opened a new, long awaited, era of high energy particle physics. The scientific quest of the LHC is the completion of the Standard Model (SM) of particles and forces and the search for novel phenomena beyond the SM. Exciting physics questions such as the existence of the Higgs boson, the missing link of the SM, supersymmetric particles, extra dimensions and many others are expected to be answered at the LHC. Another experimental effort follows the direction of exploration of hot and dense nuclear matter created in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions. It is believed that such excited nuclear medium forms a soup of deconfined quarks and gluons known as a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) [1] and provides an ideal laboratory to study the many-body aspects of Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD).

Highp_T particle production played a key role in the foundation of QCD as a theory of the strong interaction. Shortly after the discovery of point-like constituents inside the proton in Deeply Inelastic Scattering (DIS) experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) [2] and the observation of particle production at large transverse momenta in p + p collisions at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) at CERN [3], QCD emerged as a mathematically consistent theory [4].