Abstract

Over the last decade, experiments at RHIC and at the LHC have demonstrated that the fragmentation pattern of highly energetic partons is altered strongly in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. This so-called jet quenching motivates using such hard processes as well-calibrated hard probes of dense QCD matter. A central challenge for theoretical work is to relate, in a quantitatively controlled and unambiguous way, the observed jet quenching to fundamental properties of the QCD matter that induces them. I will give an introduction to the phenomenology and theoretical interpretation of jet quenching and discuss the recent attempt to describe the modification of jets based on perturbative QCD alone.