Exploring a direct measurement of quark energy loss using semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering

This work consists of an evaluation of the feasibility of a direct extraction of quark energy loss from the E02-104 experiment pi(+) data and using semi-inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS). The method is based on a shape analysis of the pion energy spectrum, coupled with a GENIE simulation which includes an hadronic cascade model in nuclei. The pion energy spectrum from different nuclei such as C, Fe, and Pb is compared to that of deuterium in order to find a simple energy shift, which is predicted by BDMPS if the parton energy is high enough that the medium length L is smaller than a certain critical length L-c. GENIE is used to rule out hadronic interaction effects which could also explain the same behavior observed in data.