Jet tomography in the forward direction at RHIC

Hadron production at high pT displays a strong suppression pattern in a wide rapidity region in heavy ion collisions at RHIC energies. This finding indicates the presence of strong final state effects for both transversally and longitudinally traveling partons, namely induced energy loss. We have developed a perturbative QCD based model to describe hadron production in pp collisions, which can be combined with the Glauber–Gribov model to describe hadron production in heavy ion collisions. Investigating AuAu and CuCu collisions at energy $\sqrt{s} = 200\,\mathrm{AGeV}$ at mid-rapidity, we find the opacity of the strongly interacting hot matter to be proportional to the participant nucleon number. Considering forward rapidities, the suppression pattern indicates the formation of a longitudinally contracted dense deconfined zone in central heavy ion collisions. We determine the parameters for the initial geometry from the existing data.