Jet quenching from soft QCD scattering in the quark–gluon plasma

We show that partons traversing a quark–gluon plasma can lose substantial amounts of energy also by scatterings, and not only through medium-induced radiation as mainly considered previously. Results from Monte Carlo simulations of soft interactions of partons, emerging from a hard scattering, through multiple elastic scatterings on gluons in an expanding relativistic plasma show a sizeable jet quenching which can account for a substantial part of the effect observed in RHIC data.