Jets and produced particles in pp collisions from SPS to RHIC energies for nuclear applications

Higher-order perturbative QCD corrections play an important role in the reproduction of data at high transverse momenta in the energy range 20 GeV≤(s)1/2≤200 GeV. Recent calculations of photon and pion production in pp collisions yield detailed information on the next-to-leading-order (NLO) contributions. However, the application of these results in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions is not straightforward. The study of nuclear effects requires a simplified understanding of the output of these computations. Here we summarize our analysis of recent calculations, aimed at handling the NLO results by introducing process and energy-dependent K factors.