EMC effect and jet energy loss in relativistic deuteron-nucleus collisions

We investigate the influence of modified nuclear parton distribution functions (PDFs) on high-pT hadron production at RHIC and LHC energies using a pQCD-improved parton model. For application at RHIC, we focus on the possible contribution of the EMC modification of the nuclear PDFs in the x > 0.3 region to the observed suppression of pi0 production at pT > 10 GeV/c in dAu collisions. We study three different parameterizations of the nuclear PDF modifications and find that they give consistent results for R_dAu(pT) for neutral pions in the region 10 GeV/c 10 GeV/c even when the systematic uncertainties in the nuclear PDFs are accounted for. The inclusion of a small final-state energy loss can reduce the discrepancy with the data, but we cannot perfectly reproduce the pT dependence of the measured R_dAu(pT). For the LHC, we find that shadowing of the nuclear PDFs produces a large suppression in the yield of hadrons with pT < 100 GeV/c in p(d)A collisions.